This episode is sponsored by Resilens, a "decision engine" for climate adaptation

When adaptation managers approach funders with a climate-proofing measure, there's one question they can count on hearing: "What's the return on this investment?"

It's a question that Oliver Marchand is determined to answer

Oliver is the CEO and co-founder of Resilens, a new start-up that styles itself as a "decision engine" for adaptation — one able to calculate the real-world costs and benefits of adaptation measures. He wants to give adaptation practitioners something they've never had access to before: an all-in-one system for transforming climate data into prioritized, fundable investment plans.

Oliver is no newcomer to climate tech. In this episode, he talks us through his previous adventures with Carbon Delta, the climate risk analytics firm he co-founded and sold to MSCI in 2019, and shares his thoughts on what the sector got right — and wrong — over the past decade.

He also offers his thesis on what's holding back investment in adaptation, and why standardizing "adaptation return" may be essential to unlocking the capital desperately needed to prepare and protect from worsening climate shocks.

If you're an adaptation practitioner, wannabe adaptech founder, or work in climate finance, this is an episode you don't want to miss.

Climate Proof has also partnered with Resilens to publish a manifesto on why adaptation needs a new decision logic. Read it HERE

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction

00:02:00 Oliver's Origin Story

00:03:30 Carbon Delta and the MSCI Years

00:04:30 What Climate Tech Got Right — and Wrong

00:07:00 Converting a Sceptic: The Case for Adaptation

00:08:30 The Rise of the Adaptation Manager

00:11:00 Introducing Resilens

00:13:30 Why Social Infrastructure and Heat?

00:15:30 The Competitive Moat

00:16:30 Theory of Change

00:19:00 Life Before Resilens: "Death by PDF"

00:25:00 The Data Security Question

00:27:30 Valuing the Unquantifiable

00:29:30 The Five-Year Vision

00:31:30 How to Find Oliver and Resilens

What do investors, corporate practitioners, and climate professionals really think about the consequences of rising climate physical risks?

A recent survey by Climate Proof and Theia Finance Labs set out to answer this question. We canvassed over 80 experts on how governments, markets, and households are likely to respond to escalating extreme weather risks and slow-onset events, and surfaced responses that reveal a broad divergence of views on this most critical of issues.

In some areas, there was an uneasy consensus. A majority of respondents expect governments to choose after-the-fact disaster relief rather than systematic adaptation investment. Most believe insurers will retreat from high-risk areas — even as households increasingly turn to insurance as their primary line of defense. And nearly nine in ten expect meaningful climate-driven migration over the coming decade.

In other areas, though, respondents disagreed — like on how corporations are likely to address climate shocks to their assets and operations.

This episode, Jakob Thomä joins from Theia Finance Labs to unpack the survey results in full, and other his unvarnished opinions on why respondents may have given certain answers. He digs into the tensions and contradictions buried in the data, explaining why compound and cascading risks are finally being taken seriously, why climate tipping points belong in risk models even if they aren’t a near-term threat, and why the real wildcard in the physical risk story may not be the climate science at all — but the political choices that determine who ultimately picks up the bill.

For anyone trying to understand where expert opinion on physical climate risk actually stands, this episode is essential listening.

Climate Proof and Theia Finance Labs plan to release a full report on the survey results later this year.

💡 Read ‘How Climate Stress Tests May Underestimate Financial Losses From Physical Climate Risks’ by Theia Finance Labs HERE

Read ‘Mandatory Climate Insurance’ by Theia Finance Labs HERE

There’s good news and bad news on the state of corporate adaptation planning. Today’s guest — Climate Proof veteran Dr Paul Munday from S&P Global Ratings — joins the pod to tell all.

First, the good news. It looks like many more public companies are disclosing adaptation plans than two years ago — 40% up from 21%, based on a sample of more than 7,500 assessed by S&P. Large, investment-grade corporates in Europe have made even more progress, with 84% disclosing climate-proofing plans.

But, but, but….the substance of many of these strategies is still lacking. Significantly, not a single one of the large European companies analyzed by S&P “demonstrate the most advanced components of adaptation planning”. In addition, only 11 out of 70 have actually implemented their plans.

Paul digs into the latest findings and shares his candid opinions on why corporates seem to be saying more about climate risk while dragging their feet on doing something about it. He also touches on why climate physical risks rarely show up in credit ratings, and what market participants should keep in mind when evaluating companies’ climate-readiness.

For those who want an up-to-the-minute take on corporate adaptation efforts, this is the episode for you.

💡 Read S&P Global’s Mercury Rising report HERE

Sign up to www.climateproof.news for more news and insights on climate adaptation finance, tech, and policy.

Questions? Comments? Email Louie at [email protected]

If you work in corporate sustainability, this pitch has become well-worn: climate resilience is good for business. Protect your assets, buttress your supply chains, and reap the rewards when trouble stirs.

It's a compelling enough argument — but one that doesn't go far enough. Today's guests want companies to remember that climate resilience is not something they can achieve alone. They need the communities in which they operate in to join the fight, too.

Verena Radulovic and Libby Zemaitis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions — better known as C2ES — are working to foster corporate-community partnerships on resilience that yield benefits for both sides.

Verena leads C2ES's business engagement work, overseeing its efforts to push resilience and adaptation up the corporate agenda. Libby runs the Climate Resilient Communities Accelerator — a place-based program now operating across Colorado, Washington, and Texas — that brings together local government, businesses, non-profits, and first responders to build coordinated resilience plans against specific climate hazards.

In this episode, the two lay out why corporate and community resilience are two sides of the same coin, walk through case studies from AT&T, Meta, National Grid, and others, and make the case for stronger public-private partnerships to scale climate-proofing efforts across the US.

For anyone trying to understand the community-corporate resilience nexus, this episode is for you.

💡 Learn more about the C2ES Climate Resilient Communities Accelerator HERE

Sign up to climateproof.news for more news and insights on climate adaptation finance, tech, and policy.

Questions? Comments? Email Louie at [email protected]

Working in climate risk management at a US bank this past decade, you'd be forgiven for having a little whiplash.

Starting around 2015, central banks and financial supervisors started probing lenders on their climate risk practices, eager to head off potential bank failures and system-wide stresses because of mounting extreme weather risks and the shift to a net-zero economy.

In the space of a few years, Wall Street became home to a new wave of risk management professionals, including climate risk modelers, sustainability analysts, and stress-test specialists. Public institutions — from the Bank of England to the Federal Reserve — also skilled up with climate risk-savvy professionals.

At this time, one of the movers and shakers in this niche was today's guest Kevin Stiroh — an Executive Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and later a Senior Advisor to the Board of Governors itself — who ran point for the central bank on several major climate supervisory initiatives.

Then, President Trump was re-elected. 'Climate' became a dirty word, and a host of central banking initiatives targeting banks' safety and soundness in the face of physical and transition risks were quietly shelved.

Following the change in administration, Stiroh joined DC-based think tank Resources for the Future, where he continues to fly the flag for climate-aware risk management across the financial system, including by helping establish the Climate-related Financial and Macroeconomic Risk Initiative in concert with Harvard's Salata Institute.

In this episode, Stiroh reflects on the climate-related efforts of the Federal Reserve and offers his view on the state of bank climate risk management today. He also expounds on his new role at Resources for the Future, and his hopes for the climate risk profession amidst fierce political headwinds.

For those interested in the past, present, and future of climate-related financial risk management, this is a must-listen.

Sign up to climateproof.news for more news and insights on climate adaptation finance, tech, and policy.

Questions? Comments? Email Louie at [email protected]

The climate start-up world is never easy. But the last year has made it harder.

Amidst the turmoil of President Trump's second coming, grants for small businesses and promising climate technologies all but evaporated. Indeed, the very word "climate" became politically radioactive in Washington.

Founders who'd spent years building companies around federal funding suddenly found themselves scrambling for cash, and pushing against unprecedented policy headwinds.

So where does that leave climate start-ups in 2026?

Stacy Swann has seen climate finance from just about every angle. She's spearheaded blended finance efforts at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), founded and sold her own climate advisory firm, and is now helping channel early-stage capital into the next generation of resilience companies as co-founder of Resilient Earth Capital — a community of angel investors doing, as she puts it, 'Shark Tank' with would-be climate entrepreneurs.

In this episode, Stacy takes us inside the pitch process, explaining what gets angels excited, what makes them nervous, and the mistakes founders make again and again. She also shares her thoughts on the shift in the start-up landscape in the two and a half years since REC launched — from an initial rush of energy transition companies to a growing army of startups in agriculture, water, extreme heat, and wildfire.

She also has a clear-eyed take on what 2026 holds — and why, whatever the political climate, the physical climate is still going to drive investment.

For founders looking for capital, investors trying to make sense of this market, or anyone curious about where early-stage climate money is actually flowing right now, this episode is for you.

Sign up to climateproof.news for more news and insights on climate adaptation finance, tech, and policy.

Questions? Comments? Email Louie at [email protected]

Scan the headlines, and you'll see the same climate-related story again and again.

It's the "uninsurability crisis".

This claims that America's insurance market is cracking under the weight of climate change. Premiums are soaring. Major carriers are pulling out of California, Florida, and other high-risk states. Homeowners who've lived in the same place for decades suddenly can't afford — or can't find — coverage.

And yet, paradoxically, the industry itself is still turning a profit.

So who is this crisis really for?

Kate Stein, Insurance Director at EDF+Business, has spent her career at the intersection of climate, insurance, and advocacy. In this episode, she explains why "uninsurability" is a crisis for policyholders long before it becomes a crisis for insurers — and what that distinction means for how we respond.

She also makes the case for a much more ambitious vision of what insurance could do, and how innovation — and greater collaboration with policyholders, developers, and banks — could save it from a climate death spiral.

For anyone grappling with what "uninsurability" really means, and how the industry could respond to climate-related stressors, this episode is for you.

Sign up to climateproof.news for more news and insights on climate adaptation finance, tech, and policy.

Questions? Comments? Email Louie at [email protected]

Pests, invasive species, and biological (PIB) threats are on the rise.

Why? You guessed it — climate change.

Higher temperatures are exacerbating the spread of crop-munching pests, waterway-clogging marine species, and disease-laden insects. Indeed, PIB risks are some of the fastest-growing and most costly in our climate-altered world. A recent paper in Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation even says they are on a par with storms, floods, and wildfires — increasing by 702% from 1980–1999 to 2000–2019.

And yet, PIB risk solutions are massively undercapitalized, and often overlooked in the adaptation investment universe.

Will Everill is on a mission to change this. He's the founder of UpRoot Capital, a new climate adaptation VC and angel syndicate targeting early-stage companies that help customers detect, monitor, and control PIB risks amidst the changing climate.

In this episode, he breaks down the emerging DX (diagnostic) and RX (control and remediation) technologies looking to tackle these threats and save agribusinesses of all stripes from biological catastrophe.

He also maps the climate mechanisms driving PIB explosions. These include warmer winters — which allow pests to overwinter and reproduce faster — and shifting wildlife migration patterns. He illustrates the impacts with vivid examples: mountain pine beetles killing 100,000 square miles of North American forest, spotted lanternflies spreading across US cities and orchards, beds of zebra mussels blocking waterways, and ticks expanding into Europe and the UK to spread lyme disease.

As one of the only investors explicitly focused on PIB as an adaptation category, Will also talks candidly about the challenges building a market that doesn't yet have a common language. This starts with educating investors on the size of the opportunity — and getting start-ups to realize "adaptation" is a category that can open wallets.

For those curious to learn about one of the great, overlooked investment frontiers in adaptation, this is a must-listen episode.

🔗 Learn more about UpRoot Capital HERE

📰 Read Will's newsletter, The Adapt, HERE

What's the investment case for climate resilience?

It's a question asked time and again here at Climate Proofers — and it's an important one. After all, if institutions can't be stirred to harden their climate defenses, the consequences will be costly: economically, financially, and societally.

It's also a question that Mike Williams, President of ClimateFirst, has bet his career on answering. With his company, ClimateFirst, he's gone all-in on quantifying climate risks to buildings and producing resiliency plans to mitigate against them.

In this episode, Mike shares how a decades-long engineering career provided a front-row seat to the emerging climate risk and resilience challenge, and explains how this inspired him to develop a scalable software solution to help real estate investors and owners take it on.

We also unpack ClimateFirst's first-of-a-kind case study, which illustrates the wisdom of investing in resilience at the building level. Mike walks us through his team's analysis of a single multifamily building "cloned" across nine US locations — each exposed to different hazards from extreme heat to flooding to hurricane-force winds. The results show that location is everything, with projected 10-year losses ranging from $70,000 to nearly $5mn for this identical asset.

He then shares the adaptive measures that can materially reduce these losses — without breaking the bank.

For all those in or around the real estate investment space — and indeed, all those interested in quantifying climate risk and resilience — this is the episode for you.

🔗 Read Investing in Resilience: Making Physical Climate Risk a Financial Priority for Real Estate HERE

📖 Read more ClimateFirst resources HERE

COP30 was billed as the adaptation COP. But did the summit live up to expectations?

In this episode, E3G Senior Policy Advisor Ana Mulio Alvarez returns to the Climate Proofers podcast to deliver a frank post-mortem on the Belém conference. She gets into the gory details on how the Brazilian presidency tried to center adaptation in the talks, only to have its own messaging derailed somewhat by President Lula's energetic push for a fossil fuel roadmap. The result: a COP defined by competing priorities and scrambled narratives.

Ana walks us through the summit's headline-making call to triple adaptation finance, and why it matters despite the ambiguous language used and lack of a clear baseline. She also comments on the supporting infrastructure of work programs, networking hubs, and financing roadmaps that may (or may not) continue to strengthen adaptation financing efforts heading into Bonn and COP31.

Then, she offers a forensic account of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) indicator negotiations, which collapsed into a confusing — and controversial — mess at the conference's climax. She explains how the final set of 59 indicators now face a legitimacy problem that could haunt the adaptation agenda for years to come. Still, she sees a silver lining. With fresh scrutiny, new analysis, and a healthy dose of political pressure, the flawed indicators have the potential to be transformed into something more useful down the line.

Ana also touches on a range of other adaptation issues spotlighted at the summit, from the overdue assessment of National Adaptation Plans to the disappointments experienced by the cash-starved Adaptation Fund.

If you want the most honest, deeply informed readout of COP30's adaptation highs and lows — Ana's got you covered.

Sign up to climateproof.news for more news and insights on climate adaptation finance, tech, and policy.

Questions? Comments? Email Louie at [email protected]