Climate Proofers

It’s a strange sort of research organization that spends its time finding ever more creative ways to destroy residential real estate.

But that’s exactly what the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) was set up to do — and for good reason. By learning how properties are damaged by extreme weather and wildfire, the non-profit is able to craft better, more resilient building standards that can save homeowners and insurers alike boatloads of cash.

In this episode, Michael Newman — General Counsel and Managing Director at IBHS — unpacks the organization’s purpose and activities, from tearing model homes apart at its research campus in South Carolina to working with partners on inventive ways to bankroll resilient housing.

Michael challenges the conventional wisdom that the climate crisis is an insurance crisis, pointing instead to a complex web of factors — inflation, litigation costs, and population growth in high-risk areas — that are making insurance accessibility and affordability more challenging. He also explains why hardening homes in line with IBHS’ FORTIFIED and Wildfire Prepared Homes standards can go a long way to lowering homeowners’ vulnerability to escalating weather risks, and how his organization is working to spread these standards far and wide.

For those wanting to understand how the US can shield its US$55trn housing market from a warmer and wilder world, Michael’s insights are not to be missed.

Put seven leading physical risk vendors to the test on a single flood-prone stretch of road outside Paris, and here’s what you get: agreement on exactly one obvious hotspot, and violent disagreement everywhere else.

It’s one of several somewhat awkward findings in a new report from the Investor Leadership Network — a coalition of institutional investors managing some US$10trn in assets — and it’s the jumping-off point for this episode’s deep dive into whether financial institutions can actually trust the climate risk data they're paying for.

Nik Steinberg, a climate risk and adaptation expert at Vector Climate Group and author of the report, and Daisy Streatfeild, Chief Sustainability Officer at asset manager Ninety One, join to dissect the physical risk vendor market and clarify what makes a provider’s outputs credible, reliable, and — most importantly — useful to investors.

Along the way, Nik and Daisy explain why vendor disagreement isn’t automatically a red flag, and why it’s important for firms to understand whether differences in model outputs are due to irreducible scientific uncertainty or footloose methodologies.

They also highlight a glaring blind spot across the physical risk data space: vendors neglecting cascading risk and system-level adaptation measures in their analyses.

For the makers — and users — of physical risk data, this episode promises to shake-up the assumptions underlying an increasingly crowded corner of the adaptech market.

Climate change is laying waste to US homes.

Economic losses in North America — including to residential property — from storms, floods, fires, and other shocks exceeded US$133bn in 2025. Extreme weather is eroding the value of American homes, in some cases wiping it out entirely. That’s squeezing the insurers that underwrite them and straining state and local governments already grappling with shrinking property tax bases.

A handful of states are trying to stop the bleeding through Resilient Homes Grant Programs: initiatives that subsidize retrofits and rebuilds designed to harden properties against climate hazards, cutting losses for homeowners, insurers, and local governments alike.

In states like Alabama, these programs are already reaping dividends. A recent study of insurance claims and payments in the state following Hurricane Sally in 2020 found that homes with fortified roofs built to an industry-leading standard had at least 55% lower claim frequency and 15% lower claim severity than homes with standard roofs.

However, they’re not perfect — and much has to be done to scale these programs to support nationwide resilience.

Elyse Schupak is a policy advocate on the climate team at Public Citizen and co-author of a new report: Principles for Resilient Homes Grant Programs. In today’s episode, she explains why these programs have become a rare win-win-win for homeowners, insurers, and state budgets, and what needs to happen to boost their reach and effectiveness.

She also unpacks their shortcomings: the issues low- and moderate-income homeowners have accessing these programs, and the roughly 20% of homes in states like West Virginia, New Mexico, and Louisiana that carry no insurance at all and are locked out of most grant programs entirely.

Elyse also walks through the mechanics of admitted markets, surplus lines, and residual “fair plan” insurers, and makes a strong case for why insurance pricing shouldn't be treated as the definitive signal for where people should — or shouldn't — live.

It’s a must-listen episode for those working at the intersection of climate risk, insurance, and resilient homebuilding.

Ask a large company about their climate exposure and you may be dismissed with the answer: "We're insured, we're fine." David Fischer has spent his career showing why that's not quite true, and working to encourage organizations to properly price extreme weather hazards and chronic stressors into their operations and supply chains.

David is Chief Product Officer of Risk Management Partners at Munich Re, the unit that puts the reinsurer's trove of catastrophe loss data and climate risk analytics into the hands of banks, asset managers, corporates, and governments.

In this episode, David breaks down how Munich Re turns raw hazard data — like flood flow models, thermal satellite imagery, wind and precipitation patterns — into financial language a CFO or risk committee can actually act on, using loss data drawn from almost a century and a half of real claims paid out by Munich Re.

He explains why he believes climate risk remains meaningfully underpriced, even as the protection gap has narrowed since 1980, from around 70-80% of losses uninsured then to roughly half today.

He also gets into the operational headaches that are frustrating corporate and financial institutions' efforts to engage with climate risk and adaptation, from model governance challenges to regulatory scrutiny, and explains how Munich Re's Location Risk Intelligence suite can help.

If you work in climate risk, banking, insurance, or corporate resilience and want a clear-eyed read on why the "great repricing" hasn't fully arrived yet, this is the episode for you.

Understanding corporations’ exposure to physical risks — and their resilience to them — is essential to building a climate-proof economy.

But if this information is manufactured by black box models and hidden behind paywalls, then investors, communities, and governments will only be able to guess at the size and scale of this challenge.

Meryam Omi is on a mission to ensure corporate resilience data is open, transparent, and accessible to those who need it.

She’s the Chief Executive of Arc, a UK-based non-profit building the “information infrastructure” for climate transition and resilience action. Prior to this, she spent 16 years in investment management trying to embed sustainability into mainstream capital allocation — work that convinced her the market was missing critical public infrastructure it couldn’t build for itself. Now, Arc is using philanthropic funding to create open data tools for the public good.

In this episode, Meryam joins us fresh off London Climate Action Week, where she unveiled the beta version of ResilienceArc — a free, interactive platform assessing corporate exposure and resilience to physical climate risks, covering physical risk profiles for 3,000 companies and full resilience assessments for 200.

We get into the mechanics of how ResilienceArc was built, including Arc’s partnerships with physical risk data provider XDI and LSE’s Earth Capital Nexus, and why Meryam is adamant the platform stays a collaborative, open alternative to the walled gardens of commercial climate risk data.

She’s candid about the limitations of the current beta, the challenges of building a rating system that actually means something rather than just chasing an ‘A’ grade, and the uncomfortable incentives working against corporate disclosure in the first place.

If you work in corporate resilience, climate risk data, or sustainable finance, this is a deep, nerdy dive into one of the sector’s thorniest problems: how to turn scattered, inconsistent climate risk information into something companies and investors can actually trust and act on.

👉 Explore ResilienceArc HERE

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]