Climate Proofers

From the outside, federal disaster relief looks stuck in the dark ages.

Before aid money can flow to communities ravaged by storms, floods, or wildfires, someone has to estimate the damage. Today, that is still mostly done by “windshield assessment”: officials drive into disaster zones, often on blocked or unsafe roads, and eyeball the destruction from their cars.

Satellite imagery, drone-based video feeds, and machine learning models could combine to paint a more accurate picture, faster — and shorten the time between initial assessment and disaster fund payout.

As today’s guest, Melissa Roberts, told the House Science Committee in September, every day aid is delayed means more small businesses close and more lives stay on hold.

Melissa is the Founder and Executive Director of the American Flood Coalition, which brings together more than 500 mayors, local officials, chambers of commerce and civic groups across over 20 states. She launched the coalition in 2019 after a year of meeting local leaders who understood their flood risk but had no realistic way to act on it.

In this episode, Melissa explains the many reasons why federal disaster response lags in adopting technology: procurement rules that lock agencies into the same vendor for up to a decade; disaster spending spread across 130 separate federal programs; and the absence of a single body responsible for innovation.

Her proposed fix is a disaster innovation center based at a national lab, like the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This center would grapple with the big questions across hazards, such as where adaptation and disaster response investments could save the most lives, and act as the public’s expert when negotiating contracts with tech vendors.

Melissa also explains why federal data needs to be accurate and interoperable before AI can make use of it, and highlights the state-level tech initiatives that are already saving lives, preserving assets, and making communities more resilient.

In July 1995, a heatwave in Chicago killed more than 700 people in less than a week. Many of them were elderly, impoverished, and living alone — without access to what could have been life-saving information.

Thirty years later, the city launched a Heat Vulnerability Index that uses hospital and public health records to show which communities are most at risk when temperatures climb, so help can reach them before it’s too late.

Peter Graffy was one of the people who built it.

Peter specializes in building epidemiologic and informatics tools that highlight health risks and their relationship to climate and environmental factors. A pulmonary and critical care postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago — and soon-to-be professor at Oregon Health & Science University — Peter is convinced there is a business case for linking climate and health data at scale. It’s a conviction that led him to co-found Straia Health, which helps employers, health systems, and governments identify the people most exposed to heat and air pollution and decide what to do for them.

In this episode, Peter explains how health data can be leveraged at scale to identify climate and environmental stressors — without compromising privacy — and what interventions can make a difference before disaster strikes.

He also shares findings from his ICU research showing that critically ill patients from more polluted neighborhoods have worse cardiopulmonary outcomes, and introduces Straia’s HeatScope tool — a dynamic risk management app that learns recursively as more data is fed into it.

For those eager to learn more about the climate-health nexus and how data is being used to anticipate risks and recommend life-saving interventions, this is the episode for you.

Getting a corporate board to fund climate resilience is hard. Getting employees further down the ladder to raise the subject at all may be harder.

Daniel Schmitz-Remberg thinks he has the solution. A veteran consultant and founder of climate adaptation advisory DSR & Partners, today (October 6) Daniel launched the Adaptation Toolbox — a powerful set of applications to help companies engage with adaptation and take steps towards resilience.

He didn’t launch it alone. This year, Daniel convened the Adaptation Exchange, a cross-sector platform engaging companies, financial institutions, insurers, solution providers, and adaptation experts in the hard but essential work of corporate climate resilience. The grouping includes individuals from some 30 organizations — including big hitters Allianz, Bayer, and PWC — as well as from start-ups like Resilens and FloodWaive. Climate Proof is a member organization, too.

The Toolbox is the Exchange’s first public offering. It represents a big bet by Daniel: that catalyzing conversations within businesses on climate risk and adaptation will eventually lead to investment in adaptation solutions, and the nourishing of the fledgling adaptation start-up ecosystem.

In this episode, Daniel walks through the Toolbox in detail, while sharing some of the funniest (and most insightful) anecdotes from his time engaging corporates on climate-proofing matters.

💡 Access the Toolbox HERE

Editor’s Note 9/30/26: The original version of this episode used inferior audio and was enhanced using editing software in a way that distorted the voices of the guests at times. The audio has since been replaced with an unenhanced version. I apologize to the guests for the error. A video version of this conversation can be viewed at the Earth Finance website.

There's a mad scramble for energy, water, and land taking place across the US – and it's forcing businesses and governments to confront real-world constraints and climate physical risks in new and confounding ways.

In this recording of a panel event at Climate Week NYC 2026, Climate Proof and Earth Finance explore how companies are grappling with the geophysical realities amidst the buildout of energy and AI infrastructure.

But like with all good Climate Week events, the conversation roams wide off topic at times – taking in what one panelist calls the "conspiracy" of climate disclosure and regulations, the importance of a systems-thinking approach to climate risks, and even the nature of risk management itself.

The panelists were:

California built a roughly $20 billion fund to keep its utilities solvent after their equipment burns down towns. Last year, the Los Angeles inferno nearly drained it — and a few weeks ago the state government's scramble to amend the wildfire liability system itself ended in collapse. A last-minute compromise bill, SB 492, fell apart on the Assembly floor, leaving some of the biggest questions in American disaster finance unanswered heading into a new governor's term.

To unpack the full story of the Golden State's wildfire liability mess, Dave Jones — former California Insurance Commissioner and current director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley's Center for Law, Energy and the Environment — joins the pod, sharing his expert insights from years within and outside the system.

At the heart of the problem is California's strict liability standard. This means when a utility ignites a fire, it owes the damages, whether or not negligence was to blame. It's this standard that pushed PG&E into bankruptcy after the 2018 Camp Fire, and it's the reason behind the current backstop fund, paid for by utilities' ratepayers and shareholders alike.

Dave walks through how the fund works, how it sits within the broader system, and what's missing in the current debate on financing wildfire recovery and prevention.

With a cannot-be-missed deadline approaching for a VIP client, Karl Mallon’s team at physical risk analytics provider XDI found a mistake in data they’d already prepared to deliver. The debate inside the company: quietly ship it and hope no one noticed, or blow the deadline, admit the error, and redo it — knowing they might lose the client.

They chose to redo it. It’s the kind of decision Karl says gets harder to make the more money is riding on the answer, but it’s Exhibit A in his argument supporting private sector climate analytics against claims of “climate risk washing” raised by two academics with the University of Exeter.

Karl is CEO of the Climate Risk Group and founder of XDI (Cross Dependency Initiative), which he started in 2007, long before other vendors muscled into the space.

In this week's episode, he tackles the academics’ argument that climate risk modeling belongs in the public sector, because private firms are structurally incentivized to soften bad news for paying clients. Karl pushes back hard, while conceding a long-running problem: he thinks the real failure is that regulators reward companies for having a go at disclosure without requiring them to report anything uncomfortable, so firms report that everything’s fine — and nobody checks.

That’s part of why XDI is working with Resilience ARC to publish its own risk views on thousands of companies unprompted, then inviting those companies to challenge with their own data, an attempt to do independently what ratings agencies like Moody’s or S&P Global do for credit risk: mark the market’s homework instead of taking self-reported numbers at face value.

The other half of the conversation is about where XDI is trying to take the industry: past risk scoring and into adaptation. Karl wants physical risk to borrow the concept of a transition plan from decarbonization, where a company’s net-zero pathway matters more than its emissions today. He argues resilience should work the same way: not just what a company's climate exposure is now, but what it’s doing about it.

Karl rounds off the conversation with his musings on the future of a climate risk analytics market roiled by geopolitics, running low on capital, and about to start a price war that could prove ruinous for some.

AI is disrupting everything — including how we estimate the financial shock of extreme weather events.

For decades, insurers, reinsurers, and other financial institutions have relied on catastrophe (or ‘cat’) models to gauge potential losses from hurricanes, floods, and runaway wildfires. But these computational tools risk being left behind by the rapidly evolving climate — and the sudden shifts in the frequency, intensity, and geography of weather hazards this entails.

Can AI help the cat model industry keep up? And what could AI-enhanced cat models mean for the re/insurance industry writ large? To answer these questions and more, Climate Proofers welcomes Dan Ward — Atmospheric Scientist at Karen Clark & Company (KCC) — to the pod.

Dan is an atmospheric scientist who’s spent nine years at KCC building models for nearly every weather peril imaginable. He explains the shift from the first generation of cat models — statistics-based systems designed for the predictable, parameterizable structure of hurricanes and earthquakes — to a second generation built for the messier, high-frequency perils that increasingly drive annual losses; and the new generation of AI-enhanced models using advanced machine learning techniques to find patterns in intimidatingly large datasets.

Dan also gets into what this shift means for the people relying on these models. He makes the case that faster, more frequent updates could mean less pricing volatility and fewer disruptive shocks between long update cycles, while cautioning that AI approaches could bring explainability and transparency challenges to financial institutions.

It’s an episode that should have something to teach everybody — from hardened cat model veterans to newcomers curious why these tools shape so much of the insurance and financial system.

👉 Read the Karen Clark & Company paper of AI in cat modeling HERE

Few public organizations have attracted the ire of the Trump administration like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). America’s premier disaster response unit found itself the target of right-wing conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 election, and earned a seemingly intractable enemy in the president himself following allegations of political bias.

Now, FEMA is in limbo, with staffers anxiously awaiting how the new administrator — Cameron Hamilton — will implement recommendations made by a White House review council on its structure and operating model.

Andrew Rumbach — Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute — joins the pod to unpack the proposed changes and evaluate the performance of FEMA under Trump 2.0. Andrew brings more than two decades of research on disaster recovery and finance to the conversation, along with the real-time, data-driven perspective he shares each week in his newsletter, Place + Resilience.

He explains the mechanics of the major disaster declaration process, and walks through evidence showing how declarations are taking significantly longer under Trump relative to other presidents. He also touches on reporting of a partisan divide in the allocation of FEMA resources — with Democratic states missing out on much-needed disaster recovery assistance.

Andrew then turns to the broader architecture of disaster recovery finance, explaining how a long-awaited change to the Community Development Block Grant–Disaster Recovery program — brought into effect by Congress earlier this year — could change the flow of dollars through the system for the better.

Financial losses from climate hazards are piling up. CEOs and major investors are sounding off in public on the perils of physical risks. But the market for adaptation solutions is yet to take off.

Why?

In this episode, Danya Liu — Climate Adaptation Specialist at BloombergNEF — shares her latest research on what’s driving take-up of adaptation solutions, and why higher losses from climate risks won’t power this market alone.

The findings make the convincing, if uncomfortable, case that adaptation may not be the unavoidable opportunity some believe it to be — at least not without supportive policy and broad-based economic growth.

Danya also shares another study from earlier this year on the fragility of US housing markets and state and local finances amidst elevated extreme weather events, and why the erosion of the property tax base in parts of the country could lead to daunting economic consequences.

Learn more about Danya's research HERE

Contact BloombergNEF HERE

Adaptation cannot happen in a vacuum. People have to understand what climate and extreme weather risks look like and feel like ahead of time in order to respond appropriately.

This is where accessible and informative science communication proves its value. It’s not enough to dump a load of statistics and measurements on an at-risk community. Looming weather events have to be made visual and visceral, and their impacts storified for populations that may not have encountered them before.

It’s a challenge familiar to Rachael Penton Gauthier, a meteorologist with a decade’s experience explaining the weather to local TV audiences across the US. Now she works with the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) creating science-based communications designed to hook the general public on making their homes and communities more resilient.

In this episode, Rachael shares her learnings from countless hours in front of the cameras educating the public on weather risks and explains why it can be so difficult to convey even basic information in a way that makes sense to the average viewer. She then unpacks her role at the IBHS and what messages are cutting through when it comes to promoting extreme weather resilience. On the way, she shares stories of the extreme weather events that shifted her perspective on the severity of climate risk and reflects on the future of the meteorology profession.