Resilience benefits are often spread so widely that no single payer sees the payoff. New models and policies are starting to close that gap.
Two years ago, sessions on resilience were hard to find at Climate Week NYC. This year, they were everywhere.
Municipal markets overlook the cost of aging infrastructure. New tools can help cities size their reserve funds against their actual exposure.
Insurance markets don't become uninsurable overnight. But the transition from insurable to uninsurable is the final stage of a sequence that can take years or decades to play out.
The economic losses from disasters that are not covered by insurance continue to grow, but resilience projects are generating measurable positive returns.
If today’s funding landscape resembles disconnected wells, then climate resilience requires something closer to a watershed—where resources are intentionally pooled, directed, and circulated across geographies, sectors, and time horizons.
Climate resilience is often framed as a problem of insufficient funding. In reality, it is a problem of how funding is structured and deployed.
Wildfire-prone communities across the West are no longer waiting for federal dollars to mitigate wildfire risk. As FEMA funding stalls and detection technology gets cheaper, local districts are investing in wildfire-detection sensors, drones, and AI-monitored cameras.
The federal government's retreat from climate adaptation has created a gap in data, funding, and coordination, but a new decentralized ecosystem of nonprofits, state governments, and coalitions is stepping up to fill the void and may prove more resilient to political disruption in the long run.
As federal disaster support shrinks, resilience districts offer local governments a promising new financing tool to fund climate adaptation on their own terms.
Resilience districts give local governments a new financing mechanism to fund climate adaptation, but their success depends on applying a forward-looking, risk-informed approach rather than defaulting to traditional bond financing logic.
The absence of references to climate change in utilities' bond disclosures suggests we have not systematically assessed how climate hazards could disrupt operations or revenues and, just as concerning, that they aren’t incorporating climate risk into capital planning and investment decisions.
Property insurance markets across the U.S. are under strain as premiums rise and insurers pull back from high-risk regions. In response, a growing number of states are leaning on public and quasi-public reinsurance backstops.
States are making a mistake by using public reinsurance mechanisms to address rising insurance costs. Legislators should invest in climate resilience and risk reduction rather than transfer risk to taxpayers and ignore the underlying drivers of catastrophic insurance losses.
Extreme weather events and a changing climate are reshaping long-term housing affordability across America. The result is a migration pattern that would have shocked demographers a decade ago: people are leaving the Sun Belt and heading to the Rust Belt.
