Los Angeles isn't short on ideas or expertise. But, like many communities rebuilding after a disaster, it lacks the connections, systems, and capacity to bring them together at scale.
The Weekly: When Governments Prove Resilience Pays Off, Insurers, Investors, and Developers Start Funding It
When benefits tied to investing in resilience can be measured and demonstrated, major new sources of capital become available to help finance resilience.
Photo credit:Nils Huenerfuerst / Unsplash.Caption: The Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank’s Municipal Resilience Fund is the capital deployment mechanism for the state’s integrated resilience strategy, affectionately termed “Resilient Rhody.”
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- Express your interest in the Rebuilding with Resilience Summit in Los Angeles: On August 18th, The Resiliency Company and the Department of Angels are convening builders, community leaders, local governments, financing partners, insurers, and resilience practitioners to explore how rebuilding with resilience becomes the norm. - Feature: How public, private, and philanthropic leaders can scale the next chapter of climate resilience. - From the archive: Insurance markets don't collapse overnight. They follow a sequence you can see coming. - In the news: Congress is set to overhaul disaster recovery, accelerating new home builds.
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Express Your Interest: The 2026 Rebuilding with Resilience Summit in Los Angeles on August 18th
Since the first Rebuilding with Resilience Summit convened in June 2025, Los Angeles has moved from ideas to action.
The Resiliency Company, in partnership with the Department of Angels, is convening builders, community leaders, advocates, local governments, financing partners, insurers, and resilience practitioners for a day focused on collaboration, strategy, and implementation built around one question: How does rebuilding with resilience become the norm?
This year's theme, Lessons into Action, moves the conversation from ideas to implementation, with practical next steps for policymakers, insurers, investors, and builders ready to make resilient rebuilding the standard across Los Angeles and beyond.
Space is limited. Readers of The Epicenter can get 10% off the ticket price with the code EPICENTER.
Click here to express your interest in attending on August 18th.
Get Early Access to Our Report: How States Are Financing Property-Level Resilience
States across the country are developing innovative approaches to finance property-level resilience investments that reduce future losses from natural hazards.
The Resiliency Company has teamed up with The Nicholas Institute to produce a report on lessons from six states that have scaled IBHS FORTIFIED roof adoption.
The report, which will be released in the next few weeks, includes lessons for policymakers, philanthropy, insurers, and investors seeking to scale resilient housing.
When Governments Prove Resilience Pays Off, Insurers, Investors, and Developers Start Funding It
In an article on The Epicenter published this week, Matt Posner, the Head of Public Finance for The Resiliency Company, and Xavier de Souza Briggs, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, argue that when benefits tied to investing in resilience can be measured and demonstrated, major new sources of capital—from mortgages and home equity loans to infrastructure bonds and insurance savings—become available to help finance resilience. In this newsletter, we share an excerpt.
Communities throughout the U.S. are entering a new era of climate adaptation. For decades, attaining greater resilience from extreme weather or related shocks was treated primarily as an environmental objective or an emergency management responsibility.
Major investments typically were made after disasters occurred, and were funded through hard-to-use federal recovery grants, insurance payouts, or state and local “rainy day” funds.
That model is increasingly unsustainable. It’s also short-sighted because weather-related losses continue to rise. The combination of growing climate-related losses, private insurer withdrawal, and federal cutbacks means that state and local governments bear an increasing share of the fiscal risks tied to extreme weather, as Pew Research recently detailed.
At the same time, states and localities are being asked to invest more in other needs, such as housing supply and affordability, modernizing infrastructure, and making up for dramatic reductions in federal funding for critical services such as healthcare.
These trends and competing pressures create both a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge is that governments cannot rely solely on taxpayer funding, especially grant-centered strategies fueled by taxes, to significantly reduce future risk. Bond debt, lending for homes and commercial real estate, and insurance innovation matter more than ever.
The opportunity lies in the fact that resilience investments create value for many players in the economy, not only for government. This is “the Great Unlock”: When that value can be measured and demonstrated, major new sources of capital—from mortgages and home equity loans to infrastructure bonds and insurance savings—become available to help finance resilience.
The Great Unlock recognizes that resilience creates measurable value for risk reduction across multiple sectors and stakeholders in the economy, from the scale of one household to the scale of an entire community.
For example, stronger homes reduce insurance claims and may make losses more predictable as well—a key to effective modeling and fair pricing. More physically resilient housing also supports mortgage markets and more stable property values. Better infrastructure improves the reliability and affordability of water and power services. Health systems experience fewer operational disruptions during extreme events, not to mention fewer high-cost and stressful emergency room visits in times of crisis. In direct and indirect ways, lower disaster losses also protect state and local balance sheets and the tax base.
Three Examples of How Incremental Change Led to Resilience | Abby Ross | Early proof points are what eventually unlock scale, and they almost never look like proof when they begin. We need the compounding of resilience over time, and we need to recognize when the next disaster creates a narrow window for rapid investments in resilience—all at once.
Urban Water Affordability Crisis Exacerbated by Climate Change | Nature Sustainability | Climate change is driving more frequent droughts, and utilities need to invest in expensive new water infrastructure. Using Santa Cruz as a case study, recent research finds that the cost of keeping taps running could push 7-16% of households into unaffordable water bill territory and analyzes how different infrastructure investment strategies could shape reliability and affordability.
The North American Wildfire Wars: Wildfires Crossing Borders, As Smoke Chokes Out Sound Reasoning | The Hotshot Wake Up | As wildfire smoke fuels political tensions between the U.S. and Canada, this commentary digs into the challenge of managing increasingly severe fires across shared landscapes. Hotshot Wake Up makes the case for deeper cooperation on forest management and firefighting resources.
Latest Precipitation Models Still Seem to Underestimate Risk as ‘1,000-Year’ Rain Events Pummel Texas | Inside Climate News | Back-to-back "1,000-year" floods in Texas are raising questions about whether the latest rainfall models, and the infrastructure standards built on them, are actually keeping pace with a changing climate. Scientists say updated precipitation estimates will likely show even greater flood risk.
Read more about resilient public infrastructure on The Epicenter here.
Housing
Congress Set to Overhaul Disaster Recovery, Speeding Up New Home Builds | Grist | A small part of a bipartisan housing bill could make the federal government's primary long-term disaster recovery program permanent, replacing the slow, ad hoc system that has often delayed housing aid for years after major disasters. The overhaul could allow the Department of Housing and Urban Development to move faster on rebuilding homes, affordable housing, and local economies after floods, fires, and hurricanes.
Visit the Lab Where They’re Fighting Fire With Fire, Literally | The New York Times | Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety are intentionally burning test homes to better understand how wildfires spread and how communities can stop them. Their experiments are helping identify the building materials, defensible space practices, and neighborhood designs that reduce catastrophic losses, while informing insurance incentives and wildfire resilience policies.
Connecticut Regulators Promote FORTIFIED Roofing Standards to Boost Storm Resilience | Insurance Business | Connecticut is encouraging builders and homeowners to adopt IBHS's FORTIFIED Roof standard, the latest in a growing number of states promoting stronger construction as severe weather intensifies. Unlike Alabama and Kentucky, Connecticut has not yet paired the program with mandatory insurance discounts.
Read more about resilient housing on The Epicenter here.
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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.
Los Angeles isn't short on ideas or expertise. But, like many communities rebuilding after a disaster, it lacks the connections, systems, and capacity to bring them together at scale.
