Sponsored by
ClimateFirst is solving climate resiliency for commercial real estate. Developed by RWDI Ventures, the start-up arm for RWDI, a global leader in climate and building-performance engineering, ClimateFirst is climate-risk analysis software that quantifies the financial impacts of physical hazards at the building-systems level. Its bottom-up methodology applies Climate Value at Risk (CVaR) assessments to reveal the added costs of climate exposure and model how targeted resiliency measures can mitigate those risks. The result is transparent, building-specific insights and Resiliency Plans backed by climate science to empower owners and operators to make data-driven decisions.
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 Mike Williams, President of ClimateFirst, has bet his career on answering. With his company, ClimateFirst, 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 provided a front-row seat to the emerging climate risk and resilience challenge, and explains how this inspired him to develop a scalable software solution to help real estate investors and owners take it on.
We also unpack ClimateFirst’s first-of-a-kind case study, which illustrates the wisdom of investing in resilience at the building level. Mike walks us through his team’s analysis of a single multifamily building “cloned” across nine US locations — each exposed to different hazards from extreme heat to flooding to hurricane-force winds. The results show that location is everything, with projected 10-year losses ranging from $70,000 to nearly $5mn for this identical asset.
He then shares the adaptive measures that can materially reduce these losses — without breaking the bank.
For all those in or around the real estate investment space — and indeed, all those interested in quantifying climate risk and resilience — this is the episode for you.
🔗 Read Investing in Resilience: Making Physical Climate Risk a Financial Priority for Real Estate HERE
📖 Read more ClimateFirst resources HERE
Listen below, download from the Podcasts page on Climate Proof, or tune in via Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
We talk about:
👉 How Mike’s years of project-by-project resilience work at RWDI revealed the need for a technology platform capable of assessing climate risk across millions of buildings
👉 ClimateFirst’s case study with BMO and Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO), which shows how climate value at risk varies dramatically by location — ranging from $70,000 to nearly $5mn over 10 years for identical buildings
👉 How ClimateFirst’s system-level modeling shows why an asset is at risk by identifying which building components fail under which hazards, helping owners move from fuzzy risk scores to decision-useful resilience information
👉 How low-cost, fast-to-deploy adaptation interventions like deployable flood barriers, can reduce projected losses by 50% or more
👉 Why insurers, lenders, and tenants are likely to begin rewarding resilient assets, and make resilience a driver of real-estate performance and financing innovation
Thanks for listening!
Louie Woodall
Editor
