S&P 500 companies mentioned "resilience" 600 times on earnings calls last quarter. The word is exploding, and it's losing meaning. New research shows only one kind of resilience moves stock prices.
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.
Over the last 15 years, Rhode Island has seen cataclysmic inland flooding, tornadoes, and rapidly rising sea levels wearing away at its coast. But the state plans to be a safer, more stable place to live in 50 years.
Nine months after the Eaton and Palisades fires, the Department of Angels released a large, community-level survey in October offering a detailed look at how homeowners perceive their recovery experience.
Two trends are colliding in state finance offices: Emergency, or “rainy day,” funds are shrinking at the exact moment climate-related revenue losses are mounting.
States are seeing their emergency reserves shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The path forward is a new, two-pronged pro-growth, pro-resilience model that expands the state’s economic base while simultaneously modernizing the financial tools used to protect it.
