We need to move beyond asking simply, How do we fund this project? and start asking, What financial risk does this community face, what outcomes could change that trajectory, and how should we invest accordingly?
Three takeaways from the first Resilient America Summit
When benefits tied to investing in resilience can be measured and demonstrated, major new sources of capital become available to help finance resilience.
Three takeaways from the first Resilient America Summit
By Matt Posner, Contributing Author for The Epicenter and Head of Public Finance for The Resiliency Company.
On July 23 in Chicago, The Resiliency Company brought together nearly 100 leaders from state and local government, public finance, insurance, philanthropy, infrastructure, investment, and the broader resilience ecosystem to explore a fundamental question at the Resilient America Summit: What will it take to move resilience from a recognized need to something communities can actually finance and deliver at scale?
Resilient America is a new initiative of The Resiliency Company, and the inaugural Summit surfaced a consistent set of themes about where the resilience field needs to go next.
As the organizer of the Summit and the head of the Public Finance practice for The Resiliency Company, here are three that stood out:
Physical risk ultimately becomes fiscal risk—through damaged infrastructure, disrupted revenues, higher operating costs, insurance pressures, and repeated recovery spending. Yet these risks are still too often treated as resilience issues rather than financial ones.
A major theme of the Summit was the need to move resilience out of a silo and into the financial systems governments already use to manage risk and allocate capital. The Resiliency Company and the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) have been developing a RiskReserve Tool (RRT) that uses Monte Carlo simulation to translate a range of future risks, including natural hazards, into potential financial losses and then tests those losses against a government’s operating budget and reserves. At the Summit, Shayne Kavanagh of the GFOA and I demonstrated how the RRT applies evidence-based risk modeling to help local governments determine how to appropriately capitalize reserve funds, account for financial liabilities, and budget for future events based on their actual financial exposure. (Want to know more about the RiskReserve Tool? Reach out to schedule a demo.)
The RRT helps reframe reserves as a form of self-insurance rather than simply a savings account: Are reserves sufficient for the risks a government faces? Are they excessive? And could some of that capital be better deployed to reduce the underlying risk?
For some communities, that analysis has identified reserve capacity beyond what modeled risks require, opening a conversation about whether capital could be redirected toward risk reduction. The larger opportunity is to make resilience part of ordinary public finance—where physical risk is quantified in financial terms and considered alongside the other risks governments already manage, rather than treated as a separate priority competing for scarce resources.
Federal, state, and philanthropic grants will remain important, but communities cannot build long-term resilience strategies around grant availability alone. With federal resources less predictable and a potential 50% reduction in federal dollars to states and localities under the current administration, the conversation is shifting toward public finance, insurance, private capital, and other market-oriented approaches.
North Carolina's insurer of last resort demonstrated what's possible: a $50M fortified roof program returned $67M+ in reinsurance savings and avoided losses, and an Insurance-Linked Security (ILS) resilience bond with a resilience kicker targeted $350M, but closed at $600M at lower-than-expected cost. The challenge is building a clearer financial case for resilience and creating structures, such as revolving loan funds, resilience bonds, and parametric insurance, that allow different sources of capital to participate at scale.
No single institution can solve community risk alone. The Resilient America Summit's core diagnosis was that resilience is a coordination problem, not a cost-benefit problem. No single actor has authority to move the whole system.
Governments, public finance professionals, insurers, investors, philanthropy, nonprofits, developers, engineers, and other partners each bring different tools to the table—as Escondido showed by partnering with a developer and IBHS to create Dixon Trail, the country's first certified wildfire-prepared neighborhood, which cut insurance costs from a projected $8–10K/year to $1,200/year.
State and local governments are uniquely positioned to convene that ecosystem because they own assets, set policy, allocate capital, and ultimately bear many of the consequences when risks materialize.
One of the clearest takeaways from the Summit was that resilience needs both a common financial starting point and a team around the table.
We need to move beyond asking simply, How do we fund this project? and start asking, What financial risk does this community face, what outcomes could change that trajectory, and how should we invest accordingly?
The RiskReserve Tool (RRT) provides a starting point: a common dataset that translates a community’s risks into potential liabilities through the lens of the government budget.
Then comes the work that Summit participants valued most: bringing governments together with public finance, philanthropy, nonprofits, insurers, investors, and practitioners in a trusted setting to work through their specific challenges and identify solutions. Start with the risk. Put a team around it. Build toward outcomes that improve both community resilience and fiscal resilience.
That is the model we want to proliferate through Resilient America. Join the Resilient America network to stay involved as we bring this approach to more communities.
Note to readers: Chatham House rules applied to the entire Summit. Named organizations were used only when the information had been made public and the entity agreed.
We need to move beyond asking simply, How do we fund this project? and start asking, What financial risk does this community face, what outcomes could change that trajectory, and how should we invest accordingly?
When benefits tied to investing in resilience can be measured and demonstrated, major new sources of capital become available to help finance resilience.
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