Alice Hill On Texas Floods, Trump's Anti-Resilience Budget Bill, And 'Climate Realism'
Release Date: 07/08/2025
Will Everill On Making Pests, Invasives & Bio Risk Tech The Next Adaptation Frontier
Climate Proofers
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 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. ...
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Mike Williams On Scaling Real Estate Resilience
Climate Proofers
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 , President of ClimateFirst, has bet his career on answering. With his company, , 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...
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Ana Mulio Alvarez on COP30’s Adaptation Highs & Lows
Climate Proofers
COP30 was billed as the adaptation COP. But did the summit live up to expectations? In this episode, E3G Senior Policy Advisor 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...
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Sabrina Bachrach On The Ground At COP30
Climate Proofers
Amid the heat, humidity, and high political drama of COP30 in Belém, adaptation finance and policy expert returns to the Climate Proofers podcast for a frank, inside-the-venue debrief on the summit so far. She walks us through the fast-moving state of play on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), and the ongoing debate over a proposed set of indicators that could help countries speak the same language on climate resilience. While the indicators — and the negotiations around them — are technical and complex, their purpose is clear: to give the adaptation process its equivalent of the...
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Simon Zadek On Catalyzing The Adaptation Economy
Climate Proofers
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 with , Co-Founder and Co-Managing Partner of , a new company stocked with sustainable finance and business veterans looking to bring about an economy fit for a 1.5°C-plus world. Simon traces his career from early work on labor rights and social auditing through to his leadership in green finance and nature-based investment,...
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Ben Abraham On The Battle For Adaptation Finance At COP30
Climate Proofers
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 Toni calling the summit a for adaptation and resilience. Once again, the question of finance hangs heavy over the talks. This time around, it’s focused on whether rich countries will commit to a dedicated adaptation finance target, one that would channel much-needed resources to poor nations struggling under a barrage of compounding climate...
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Mishal Thadani On The Business of Grid Resilience
Climate Proofers
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 meet the energy demands of the AI craze. How can power providers expand and build resilience against extreme weather shocks at the same time — without blowing the bank? Getting access to better data and risk modeling would be a good start. Rhizome is a pioneer in the buzzy grid resilience tech market, and is already working with a clutch of...
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Theresa Hoffmann On Reinventing Insulation For A Warming World
Climate Proofers
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 , a start-up working on super-insulating, super-thin, and super-light materials using bio-aerogels — free from petrochemicals and 100% biocompatible (meaning they don’t harm those living around them). , CEO at NANOPLUME, joins the pod to share the magic of bio-aerogels, and explain how they can transform the way we insulate our homes and transport goods around the world. She also describes her personal journey to launching an...
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Hunter Maats On Turning Climate Resilience Into Real Estate Alpha
Climate Proofers
Could understanding the value of resilience be the route to riches in a climate-changed world? 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 estate asset manager — digs into the climate and affordability factors causing people (and capital) to flee the Sunbelt for the Great Lakes, and what this means for US housing markets. He also lays out the case for forward-looking, climate-informed investing in real assets, and why a resilience-first approach should replace the uncomfortable duality of ESG...
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Krista Tukiainen On Leveraging AI for Adaptation Finance
Climate Proofers
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 networkers crisscrossing Manhattan last month. One proponent of AI in the climate space is today’s guest, , the Co-Founder of ClimateAligned — an AI-powered start-up that’s democratizing sustainability data and climate assessments at a fraction of the price of the big incumbents. She shares her thoughts on Climate Week and the...
info_outlineFor 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, and the scaling back of emissions targets by rich countries, there’s lots for climate policy wonks — not to mention the rest of us — to be nervous about.
Perhaps a change in strategy is needed. A different way to press home the importance of climate mitigation and adaptation that suits the febrile times. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) thinks it has just the ticket: the Climate Realism Initiative. With adaptation as a central pillar, the initiative promotes investing in national resilience, preparing for climate shocks at home and abroad, and navigating the geopolitical realities of climate change.
In this episode, Alice Hill, David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at CFR and a veteran of the Obama White House, joins to discuss the new program — and some of the controversy it has generated in climate policy circles.
Alice also shares her snap analysis of President Trump’s newly signed “big, beautiful bill,” which guts clean energy tax incentives and climate resilience projects, and offers her reflections on the horrific flash floods in Texas, which have claimed over 100 lives.
She then digs into why the US needs a “Manhattan Project" for climate risk modeling and much, much more investment in adaptation innovation if it is to survive and thrive.
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Questions? Comments? Email Louie at louie@climateproof.news.
📚Read Alice's essay 'The Adaptation Imperative' at Foreign Affairs
📚 Learn about the Climate Realism Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations