Climate Proofers

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...

An awkward thing about the company Ben Andrews founded is that its name is a little out-of-date.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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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....

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...

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...

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 ...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...