Climate Proofers
Climate Proofers is a podcast from Climate Proof, hosted by editor Louie Woodall. It offers roundups of the latest news in climate adaptation and resilience, covering finance, technology, and policy. The show also features interviews with key climate proofers—experts working at the cutting edge of adaptation finance. Together, these episodes examine how communities and institutions are responding to climate risks.
Episodes
Melissa Roberts On The Case For A Federal Disaster Innovation Center
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”: o...
Peter Graffy On Democratizing Climate-Health Intelligence
In July 1995, a heatwave in Chicago ( https://www.weather.gov/lot/1995_heatwave ) killed more than 700 people ( https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2002/07/01/heat_wave/ ) in less than a week. Many of them were elderly, impoverished, and living alon...
Daniel Schmitz-Remberg On Getting Adaptation Into the Corporate Budget
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 ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-schmitz-remberg/ ) thinks he has the solution...
CWNYC 2026: Securing Growth in a Resource-Constrained World
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...
Dave Jones On California's Wildfire Liability Deadlock
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...
Karl Mallon On Combating 'Climate Risk Washing'
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...
Dan Ward On What AI Can — and Can't — Do for Cat Models
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 hurri...
Andrew Rumbach On FEMA's Reform Reckoning
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 electi...
Danya Liu On What's Really Driving Adaptation Markets
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 ( https://www.linkedin...
Rachael Gauthier On the Science of Risk Communication
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 va...
Michael Newman On Hardening Homes Against Hail, Wind, and Fire
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 reas...
Nik Steinberg & Daisy Streatfeild On Why Climate Risk Vendors Can't Agree
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...
Elyse Schupak On Fixing America's Resilient Homes Grant Programs
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 ( https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/cli...
David Fischer On Pricing Physical Risk Into Every Financial Decision
Ask a large company about their climate exposure and you may be dismissed with the answer: "We're insured, we're fine." David Fischer ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-n-fischer-56249849/ ) has spent his career showing why that's not quite true, and ...
Meryam Omi On Why Corporate Adaptation Data Needs to Be Open
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, communitie...
Oliver Marchand On Why Adaptation Needs A New 'Decision Engine'
This episode is sponsored by Resilens ( https://resilens.com/ ), 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...
Jakob Thomä On How Markets And Governments Could Respond To Climate Shocks
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 ( https://theiafinance.org/ ) set out to answer this que...
Paul Munday On The Latest In Corporate Adaptation Planning
There’s good news and bad news on the state of corporate adaptation planning. Today’s guest — Climate Proof veteran Dr Paul Munday ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/drpaulmunday/ ) from S&P Global Ratings — joins the pod to tell all. First, the good news. ...
Verena Radulovic & Libby Zemaitis On Why Corporate Resilience Starts In The Community
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 th...
Kevin Stiroh On The Bank Climate Risk Management Rollback
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 p...
Stacy Swann On Angel Investing In Climate Resilience
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" be...
Kate Stein On Confronting America's Uninsurability Crisis
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 pu...
Will Everill On Making Pests, Invasives & Bio Risk Tech The Next Adaptation Frontier
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, PI...
Mike Williams On Scaling Real Estate Resilience
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:...
Ana Mulio Alvarez on COP30's Adaptation Highs & Lows
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 in...
Sabrina Bachrach On The Ground At COP30
Amid the heat, humidity, and high political drama of COP30 in Belém, adaptation finance and policy expert Sabrina Bachrach returns to the Climate Proofers podcast for a frank, inside-the-venue debrief on the summit so far. She walks us through the fast...
Simon Zadek On Catalyzing The Adaptation Economy
What policy ideas could help catalyze the adaptation economy? How can markets be coaxed into supporting climate-proofing innovations? And what does a new, Swiss-based start-up have to do with all this? On today's episode, Climate Proofers sits down wit...
Ben Abraham On The Battle For Adaptation Finance At COP30
The Super Bowl of climate politics is almost upon us. COP30, the UN Climate Change Conference, is about to kick off in Brazil — and expectations are running high for adaptation advocates. Brazilian leaders are fueling that momentum, with COP30 CEO Ana ...
Mishal Thadani On The Business of Grid Resilience
There's no two ways about it: the US power grid is in poor shape. Wildfires, floods, and hurricanes continue to harry electric utilities and take down grid infrastructure, all while the country is rushing frantically to build out additional capacity to...
Theresa Hoffmann On Reinventing Insulation For A Warming World
Old-school insulation is no match for our climate-adjusted world. With temperatures rising, we need a new wave of materials and technologies to meet the moment. Enter NANOPLUME, a start-up working on super-insulating, super-thin, and super-light materi...
Hunter Maats On Turning Climate Resilience Into Real Estate Alpha
Could understanding the value of resilience be the route to riches in a climate-changed world? Hunter Maats is betting his career on it. In this final episode of our New York Climate Week interview series, the CEO of Resilience Investments — a real est...
Krista Tukiainen On Leveraging AI for Adaptation Finance
At New York Climate Week, two letters were heard again and again: AI. It's the world's hottest technology, with humongous potential to augment and accelerate a whole host of climate-positive actions. No wonder it was popular among the panelists and net...
David Leathers On Making Workforce Health a Climate Priority
What does climate change mean for America's workforce? In this fourth installment of our New York Climate Week interview series, David Leathers takes the mic to explain why employers need to treat climate risk as a health and productivity issue — not j...
Mike Gulla On Why Insurance Needs a Makeover for a Changed Climate
Welcome to the third edition of our Climate Week NYC interview series! Today, we have something for all the finance- and tech-heads among you. In this episode, Louie sits down with Michael (Mike) Gulla, CEO and Co-Founder of Adaptive Insurance, to disc...
Abby Ross & Joe Rozza On Why Resilience Is the New Bottom Line
For the next installment of our New York Climate Week interview series we have a double-header: Abby Ross, Founder & CEO of The Resiliency Company, and Joe Rozza, Chief Sustainability Officer at Ryan Companies. Together, they share their reflections on...
Climate Week NYC Interviews: Ben DeAngelo
In this episode, Louie sits down with Ben DeAngelo, Principal and Founder of Operation Future and former Director of the Office of Climate Adaptation and Sustainability at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Fresh from launching his new consu...
Andrew Lala On Democratizing Weather Intelligence
*This episode of Climate Proofers is sponsored by Ignitia* Weather intelligence is one of most exciting frontiers in adaptation and resilience tech. But market solutions rub up against an uncomfortable paradox — the people who need weather intelligence...
Prashant Mupparapu On Enabling Climate-Resilient Infrastructure
The intersection of climate and finance is getting crowded, making it tougher for adaptation start-up founders to stand out. Today's interviewee is betting there's room for a fresh offering targeting a particularly complex branch of the financial syste...
Andy Love On Cooling The UK: Buildings, Shade, & Heat Resilience
We spend most of our time in the built environment. If it's not designed with climate change in mind, then we all stand to lose. Our health, our wellbeing, our productivity — all can suffer if we're confined to spaces that can't handle higher temperatu...
Jake Rascoff & Steven Rothstein On Exposing Climate Risk In The $4 Trillion Muni Bond Market
Where will the climate financial crisis hit first? Is it in corporate earnings? Equity prices? Home values? Sustainability advocacy organization Ceres sees the storm breaking in the US$4trn municipal bond market, where cities and local governments rais...
Anjana Agarwal On Adaptation Tech For Utilities
It's hard work being a start-up founder. Harder still in the climate adaptation space. First off, you've got the challenge of explaining to would-be clients and investors what climate adaptation actually is. Then you have to figure out what form of lan...
Ben Andrews On Building An Adaptation Consultancy
An awkward thing about the company Ben Andrews founded is that its name is a little out-of-date. Adapt40 is the bespoke adaptation consultancy he set up in 2021, which is today engaged in projects all over the world: from Dartmoor in the UK to the isla...
Debbie Hillier On Adaptation Indicators, Finance, & The Bonn Climate Talks
Eleven frantic days of negotiations at the Bonn climate talks this June yielded an important breakthrough: agreement on how to define 100 indicators for measuring global progress on adaptation. Reaching consensus was by no means easy. Adaptation is com...
Alice Hill On Texas Floods, Trump's Anti-Resilience Budget Bill, And 'Climate Realism'
For most climate-conscious folks, the world is a little more scary than it was back in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was signed. Ok, maybe a lot more scary. With a climate-denier in the White House, destructive wars raging in Europe and the Middle East...
Jonathan Cook & Jainey Bavishi On The State of Adaptation Post-Biden
It's been 161 days since President Trump's second inauguration. In that time, US climate adaptation policy has been utterly transformed — and not for the better. Today's episode — recorded at the recent Adapt Unbound 2025 conference in New York — unpac...
Katie Walsh On Financing the $86 Billion City Climate Gap
Climate change is placing cities under siege. This week alone, urban sprawls across North America, Europe, and Asia are sweltering under extreme temperatures and bracing for heavy storms and flood-bringing rains. They need cold, hard cash to build up t...
Garrett Kephart On Scaling Climate Intelligence Through Spatial Finance
What does it take to build a cutting-edge climate strategy firm? For Garrett Kephart, CEO and Co-Founder of Earth Finance, years of experience paddling through the Canadian wilderness and trekking the mountains of the Western US came in handy. As a sea...
Yue (Nina) Chen On Embedding Climate Risk Into Bank Supervision
There are few things more devastating to a country's economy than a full-blown financial crisis. In the US, the memory of the near-implosion of the banking industry in 2008-2009 is seared into the minds of policymakers. It may be hard to recall just ho...
Paige Roepers On Geospatial Data For Coastal Resilience
Climate change is giving the coasts one hell of a beating. Rising oceans and worsening seaborne tempests are chipping away at our shorelines, degrading coastal ecosystems, and putting trillions of dollars of property, infrastructure, and water-based co...
Laurie Schoeman On Why Adaptation Needs A Seat At The Top Table
Who better to star in our 50th episode than Laurie Schoeman? Laurie is a highly respected champion of climate resilience, housing policy, and sustainable investment in the US — with a career that's taken her from construction projects in San Francisco ...
Jo Kerr & Jonny Casey On Climate-Proofing Scotland
Scotland is a beautiful, wild, and dynamic country. It's also one of many facing a barrage of climate risks that, if left unchecked, threaten to harm its people and hobble its economy over time. Verture is working to prevent this. The Scottish charity ...
Josh Hacker On The Evolution Of Climate Risk Models
What does it really take to model climate risk in a way that businesses and financial institutions can use? In this episode, Josh Hacker — Chief Science Officer at Jupiter Intelligence — joins to talk about how the climate risk modeling discipline has ...
Sarah Farrell On Financing The "Resilience Continuum"
Time is not on our side. Climate risks are here, and are only getting worse. To protect and prepare vulnerable communities, we need finance to rush in at speed and in scale. Impatience Earth, as the name suggests, isn't waiting around to see this done....
Washington Insurance Commissioner Kuderer On Her Climate Risk Priorities
Commissioner Patty Kuderer has been in office for 104 days. She's got a lot on her plate. As Washington's top insurance official, Kuderer is responsible for overseeing the more than 800 insurers in the state and protecting policy holders from unfair pr...
Jyotsna Puri On Rethinking Adaptation Finance
Few have insights into the global adaptation finance landscape like Jyotsna "Jo" Puri — economist, climate finance expert, and Director of Policy and Programs at the UN Environment Programme. With a career spanning the Green Climate Fund, International...
Susan Crawford On How The US Government Is Failing Adaptation
The Trump White House is taking a hammer to the federal agencies, programs, and initiatives that promote climate adaptation and resilience. As part of its chaotic effort to shrink the size of government and eliminate any and all climate work by the US ...
Sonam Velani On Why Cities Are The Frontlines Of Climate Adaptation
Cities are getting hammered by climate shocks. These concrete jungles are highly exposed to extreme weather events and slow-onset climatic changes — from wildfires (Los Angeles) to floods (Nashville, Lagos, Karachi) to heatwaves (Delhi, Houston, Madrid...
Theo Bachrach On Championing Corporate Climate Resilience
Theo Bachrach is a resilience professional par excellence. Over the last five years, he's worked for not one, not two, but three organizations with 'Resilience' in the title, and helped coordinate a UN-backed campaign that has brought hundreds of compa...
Oliver Wing On the Future of Flood Risk Modeling
What if we could map every river, every coastline, and every floodplain on Earth — and use that knowledge to build a more climate-resilient future? It sounds ambitious, but this is exactly what UK-based Fathom has set out to do. The flood and climate r...
Carolyn Kousky On Building Resilience Through Insurance
Dr. Carolyn Kousky is a true believer in the power of insurance for building climate resilience. So much so that she recently founded Insurance for Good, a new nonprofit dedicated to harnessing insurance for social and environmental resilience. In this...
Avinash Persaud On Unlocking Development Banks' Potential For Adaptation
Avinash Persaud isn't afraid to tell the hard truths on adaptation finance. At a conference in Brasilia last month, the Special Advisor on Climate Risks to the President of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) told delegates that trillions of doll...
Sadie Frank On Supply Chain Risks In A Climate-Adjusted World
Supply chains are the "veins of the economy", says Sadie Frank, Co-Founder of N4EA, a startup working to make these more resilient to escalating climate risks. Like veins in the human body, they are essential — but also fragile. In today's episode, Sad...
Stephen Hammer On The New York Climate Exchange
New York is a truly world-leading city. Finance, tech, education — the Big Apple has it all, and attracts talent from across the globe because of its well-earned status as the place where You Can Make It. It now aspires to become the global epicenter f...
Clare Ballantine & Isona Shibata On Philanthropy's Role In Adaptation Finance
How can philanthropy bridge the massive funding gap in climate adaptation? In this episode, Clare Ballantine, Head of the Howden Foundation, and Isona Shibata, Head of International Programs at Ashden, unpack the role of philanthropic capital in buildi...
David Carlin On Why Climate Disclosures Aren't Enough
Everyone who's anyone in climate knows David Carlin. David has been at the forefront of climate risk management and disclosure since the first rush of industry- and UN-led initiatives swept across the financial sector in the run-up to COP26. Over many ...
Chris Goolgasian On Adaptation Stocks & Strategy
What makes a company an "adaptation play?" It's a question Chris Goolgasian, Director of Climate Research and portfolio manager at the $1.2trn investment company Wellington Management, has devoted himself to in recent years. Chris oversees an investmen...
Jorge Gastelumendi On Climate Games, Chief Heat Officers, And Reshaping Resilience
How can video games drive climate resilience? Could Minecraft and Fortnite teach kids (and adults) about adapting to extreme temperatures and other punishing climate risks? Jorge Gastelumendi, Senior Director at the Atlantic Council's Climate Resilienc...
Frank Frievalt On America's Wildfire Nightmare
While the Los Angeles fires continue to rage, the debate on what should be done — and indeed what can be done — to prepare and protect communities from these kinds of infernos is heating up. The multiple blazes are also highlighting the frightening pot...
Julia Kumari Drapkin On Crowdsourcing Climate Data
There's one thing all adaptation professionals agree on — we need more climate data. And better climate data. And climate data people can trust. But needing is one thing. Getting is another. Julia Kumari Drapkin is pioneering a new way of collecting an...
Emilie Mazzacurati On Tailwind Climate's Adaptation Playbook
Climate adaptation technology isn't getting a lot of love from markets right now. Extreme weather shocks may be on track to inflict some US$560bn or so of losses on listed companies every year by 2035, but so far very little early investor money is goi...
The Future of US Climate Adaptation & Resilience Under Trump 2.0
"Climate change" is likely to become taboo under the second Trump administration. The incoming president believes global warming to be a "hoax", and Project 2025 – the right-wing blueprint for his second term – calls for erasing climate change referenc...
Jonathan Bowers On Building a Firetech Startup
Wildfires are on the rampage across North America. Canada and the US are battling blazes more often and for longer periods. This fall, wildfires have burnt on East and West Coasts alike. Even New York City, that vaunted concrete jungle, has succumbed. ...
Ana Mulio Alvarez On COP29
How did COP29 advance (or obstruct) the climate adaptation agenda? While the conference produced a controversial new climate finance goal, this had little to offer developing countries working to climate-proof their populations. On the other hand, agre...
Julie Gorte On Investor Engagement With Adaptation
Investment professionals can't bury their heads in the sand when it comes to climate risks. Extreme weather shocks are inflicting billions in losses to physical assets and businesses — losses that flow through to financial instruments like bonds, loans...
Nakita Devlin On The Promise Of Parametric Insurance
Parametric insurance is all the rage in climate resilience circles. This is a financial product that pays out to policyholders upon a triggering event – like after a certain amount of rainfall hits an area, or if temperatures exceed a certain threshold...
Valkyrie Holmes On Climate InsurTech
The insurance industry is on the front lines of climate risk. In order to write profitable policies in high-risk zones, carriers need data and insights that give them an edge – and customers who know how to build climate resiliency. Enter Faura, an Ins...
Emma Howard Boyd On The London Climate Resilience Review
London has sustained a barrage of climate shocks in recent years – from devastating heat waves to flash flooding and a string of "rain bombs". The metropolis has to defend itself against these shocks. As the engine of the UK economy, anything that happ...
Adam Freed On Climate-Proofing Cities
City leaders are up to their necks in climate risks. They need help to harden their people and places against floods, storms, and heat waves. Why not call Adam Freed? Today's Climate Proofers guest is a Principal at Bloomberg Associates, an organizatio...
Michael Jacobs On Accelerating Climate Tech
Cities are magnets for climate risks. We've designed metropolises that intensify hazards like floods and extreme heat, and have to nurture and scale solutions to address their impacts – fast. Hence the importance of accelerators: programs that support ...
Alan Leung On Climate Risks To Geopolitics And Security
Climate change is injecting volatility into geopolitics, with worrying implications for international relations and the (already fraying) rules-based order. Physical climate risks also have the potential to catalyze future geopolitical shocks – which c...
