Several drivers are contributing to the rise in expensive severe convective storms: 1) population growth in high-risk areas; 2) non-resilient physical assets; and 3) rising building premiums.
Population growth in areas prone to severe storms has increased asset exposure and the physical assets in harm's way are not designed to withstand high winds or hail. Meanwhile, building premiums to rebuild after severe storms are increasing.
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City leaders across the U.S. know they need more resilient infrastructure to guard against worsening climate events. Investments like cool roofs and cool pavements, permeable paving, green stormwater infrastructure, and strategic tree planting have all proven to reduce heat and flooding. Yet cities tend to build the same way they have for decades—exposing them to greater risk at a time of accelerating climate hazards.
Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy and Programs at the Smart Surfaces Coalition (SSC), has a three-part diagnosis for why: “Inertia, staff capacity, and misperceptions of the economics of resilience.” To overcome these issues, cities need clear economic evidence about their potential returns on investment. They also need purpose-built data and benefit-cost analysis tools that make it easy to take action.
The Epicenter spoke with Updike about how SSC provides solutions to help cities move from isolated infrastructure projects to system-wide resilience policy.
Economic Evidence Is What Moves Cities From Pilot to Policy
"We need to move away from ‘death by pilot’ and get to comprehensive transformation and decision-making," says Updike. SSC addresses this by providing high-resolution micrometeorological modeling to simulate extreme heat and flooding issues. It also forecasts the potential impact of solutions with the goal of predicting how resilience investments would perform locally. With this information, the SSC team develops benefit-cost analyses that city leaders can use to build a case for new policies or investments.
Those numbers were compelling enough for a Baltimore City Council member to introduce five key pieces of legislation in recent years: a cool roof ordinance, a study to establish a Climate Resilience Authority, multiple tree protection bills, and research into an urban meadows program.
Overstretched City Staff Need Tools That Are Fast And Accurate
"I used to be a city policymaker in Washington, D.C.,” says Updike. “Time was a real constraint.” City staffers are frequently over capacity, working under tight budgets, and pressed to move quickly. For those reasons, SSC intentionally built their data tools to be “high resolution, high quality, but also very quick and easy to run.” A full benefit-cost analysis can be completed in under five minutes.
In Atlanta, those tools quickly changed the legislative math. The city used SSC's model cool roof ordinance as its template. When a council member raised skepticism about the proposal, noting that Atlanta is known for its tree canopy, SSC cited its data showing that 74% of the single-family residential roof area in the city is actually unshaded by trees. The bill passed unanimously.
Resilience Is a Shared Priority Across Party Lines
SSC is deliberate about using clear ROI data to keep the economic evidence non-ideological. Their partner cities include mayors from both parties. "We can really just focus on the resilience story, the health story, the cost-effectiveness story,” says Updike. “No one likes extreme heat, nobody likes flooding, and everybody wants resilience."
2025 Saw Relatively Fewer Natural Disasters. Will You Get a Break on Home Insurance? | NPR | A quieter year for U.S. disasters in 2025 may ease some pressure in the insurance market, with places like Florida already seeing modest premium relief. But experts say most homeowners shouldn’t expect significant rate cuts. After years of climate-driven losses, insurers are likely to keep prices elevated, particularly in regions facing growing hail, tornado, wildfire, and flood risks.
The Role of Insurance in Building Resilience Across the Energy-Water-Climate Nexus | World Economic Forum | This piece lays out five principles for insurers looking to build resilience as insured losses from natural catastrophes hit $100 billion in the first half of 2025. They include reducing risk at the source, investing before disasters strike, making risk-sharing explicit, acknowledging that data can't replace political will, and ensuring pricing doesn't deepen inequality.
FEMA Will Relaunch Climate Resiliency Grants | New York Times | A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration's cancellation of FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program was illegal, and FEMA has agreed to reinstate it. The 22 states that sued to restore it estimated that BRIC and its predecessors had prevented $150 billion in disaster damage over two decades.
Chattanooga Utility Partners to Boost Grid Resilience | Smart Cities World | Chattanooga has built five microgrids capable of powering more than 1,000 homes and critical facilities like fire stations, community centers, and grocery stores during broader outages. A technical advance worth watching: a new control platform that allows microgrid boundaries to expand or contract dynamically. It also supports "nested" microgrids where smaller grids can support one another during failures.
Read more about resilient public infrastructure and government solutions on The Epicenter here.
Real Estate & Construction
A Warmer Climate Means Bigger Hail | Inside Climate News | New research digs into how warming intensifies hail and leads to more roof damage for property owners. Researchers have, for the first time, linked human-caused warming to hailstone size in a single storm: a May 2025 event that pelted Paris with golf ball-sized ice and caused more than $350 million in property damage.
Errors Discovered in Hundreds of Sea Level Studies Have Changed Coastal Hazard Maps Around the World | Earth.com | A sweeping analysis of 385 coastal hazard assessments found that more than 99% handled sea-level baselines inadequately. Properly aligned, the amount of land falling below the projected sea level grows by over 30%. Coastal planners, homebuyers, and investors may have been relying on hazard maps with inaccurate information.
Read more about resilient real estate on The Epicenter here.
Private Investment
NICHE: South Florida’s New Home for Extreme Storm Research | FIU Research Magazine | Florida International University is planning the world’s largest facility for testing how buildings and coastlines withstand hurricanes. The testbed’s research is designed to support commercial applications in high-tech building materials, nature-based coastal protection, and resilient construction.
Can You Fight Fire with Fire? | Convective Field Notes | BurnBot builds machines that automate prescribed burning, treating land faster and at lower cost than traditional methods. The opportunity is significant: the U.S. Forest Service estimates 63 million acres of national forest land are overdue for treatment, but the country manages only 2-3 million acres per year. For investors in the wildfire resilience space, that gap is the pitch.
Read more about private investment on The Epicenter here.
Severe Storms: The Cost Drivers Making Them So Expensive | The Epicenter Editors | Population growth in areas prone to severe storms has increased asset exposure, and the physical assets in harm's way are not designed to withstand high winds or hail. Meanwhile, building premiums to rebuild after severe storms are increasing.
Financing the Resiliency Delta | Abby Ross | When disaster strikes, the question is not whether we will rebuild, but how. The problem is that it costs more to rebuild a home to disaster-resilient standards. We need new flexible and dedicated financing products that make it easier for homeowners to make critical resilience investments.
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The Epicenter helps decision makers understand climate risks and discover viable resilience solutions. The Epicenter is an affiliated publication of The Resiliency Company, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and empowering humanity to adapt to the accelerating challenges of the next 100+ years.
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