NOAA Climate Resilience Grant Cuts, UK Pilots Flood Performance Certificates, Microsoft's Weather Modeling Fix, and More

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has cut funding for new climate and coastal adaptation grants by 73% since fiscal 2024, data from non-profit Grant Witness shows.

The agency signed off on US$396.8mn in fiscal 2026 through September 25, compared to US$680mn the year prior and a whopping US$1.46bn in 2024, the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration.

NOAA has awarded 122 climate resilience and coastal grants this fiscal year, down from 361 in fiscal 2024. Of 26 NOAA grants disrupted since 2025, 19 funded resilience and adaptation work, leaving US$28.5mn unpaid. These include hundreds of thousands of dollars for coastal management, community engagement on flood-resilient infrastructure, and extreme heat research.

Four of these grants have been restored following legal and political pressure, including one for more than US$2.5mn to the University of Washington’s Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. In 2025, Washington’s attorney general sued the Trump administration for over US$9mn in NOAA climate resilience grants it had withheld.

Awards had grown fast before that, from 67 grants worth US$81.8mn in fiscal 2021. Grant Witness attributes the recent decline to the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency scrapping grant programs authorized by former President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

“The termination and slowdown of climate change adaptation grants from NOAA matches the pattern we’ve seen over and over again under this administration: broken promises to American communities, driven by an anti-science ideology, and contempt for good government,” said Noam Ross, Co-founder at Grant Witness.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is launching a €400mn (US$449mn) five-year resilience bond, its second to be certified under the Climate Bonds Initiative’s Resilience Taxonomy (CBRT). The city was the first to debut a CBRT resilience bond in 2025 — a €300mn (US$337mn) instrument that was seven times oversubscribed. The latest bond will finance aspects of Tokyo’s Resilience Project, including sewer upgrades and flood-proofing at water reclamation centers and pumping stations. (Climate Bonds Initiative)

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called for private lenders to increase the take-up of “pause clauses” in debt instruments with climate-vulnerable nations. These contract features allow borrower repayments to be frozen temporarily in the wake of natural disasters. In a speech ahead of World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok, Miliband also argued in favor of pre-arranged disaster finance, citing current data showing only 2% is arranged ahead of time today, even though 35% of shocks are predictable. Miliband did not announce new money from the UK for disaster finance mechanisms. (UK Government)

Hot weather is influencing how Britons’ spend their money, analysis of credit card data by UK bank Barclays suggests. Consumer card spending surged 2.0% in July and 2.1% in August amidst a prolonged period of high temperatures, its strongest growth rate in over a year. While some of this flowed into the entertainment, hospitality, and leisure sectors as Britons took advantage of outdoor activities, plenty went into personal climate adaptation, too. Nearly half of consumers bought portable fans and 17% bought portable air conditioners, according to Barclays research. (Barclays)

Installing a £1,000 (US$1,330) flood resilience package in new homes could save up to £7mn (US$9.3mn) in avoided losses and house price devaluation across all such properties in any given year, according to analysis by UK insurer Aviva. The company estimates savings of around £300 (US$400) per home, meaning the flood resilience measures would pay for themselves in just over three years. Aviva estimates one in nine homes built in England in the past three years sit in medium or high flood-risk zones. (Aviva)

The European Investment Bank (EIB) signed a €67mn (US$78mn) loan with Spanish water utility Consorcio de Aguas de Asturias to climate-proof drinking water supply in the north of the country, its first financing deal in the region for 17 years. The loan is intended to mobilize more than €211mn (US237mn) of investment, according to regional minister Alejandro Calvo, who chairs the public water utility. Funded projects include new pumping stations on the Narcea river and an expanded water treatment plant in the city of Rioseco. The deal is part of the EIB Group's €15bn Water Resilience Programme for 2025–2027. (European Investment Bank)

Anonymous insurance executives say some UK and European carriers pressed catastrophe modelers and actuaries to lower forward-looking climate projections so they could continue underwriting certain client risks. The allegations, written in a memo published by UK non-profit Inside Track, suggest commercial pressures are overriding prudent risk management in parts of the industry. The executives also warn that a broad pullback of property cover caused by escalating climate risks could destabilize mortgage markets, likening the scale of the threat to the pre-2008 US subprime housing crisis. (Inside Track)

England will trial Flood Performance Certificates (FPCs) that rate homes on flood risk and resilience, the UK government and reinsurance scheme Flood Re announced last Tuesday. Modeled on Energy Performance Certificates, the documents aim to give homeowners, insurers, and lenders a standardized assessment of each property’s ability to withstand floodwaters.

A proposed “Flood Performance Rating” will split risk into categories including exposure, building characteristics, and resistance. The associated metrics will draw on Environment Agency data covering river and surface water hazards. Certificates will credit measures such as self-closing air bricks, flood barriers, and resilient kitchens, and flag where further work is needed. Pilots begin this year in flood-prone areas and will expand across the country in 2027.

“Such certificates have the potential to remove the burden from homeowners to prove their risk or resilience, whilst also giving them standardized information on what more they can do to adapt and providing confidence to insurers and mortgage providers,” Kit England, Climate Adaptation Specialist at UK consultancy Paul Watkiss Associates, told Climate Proof. But he added that it is important the certificates do not bring about a rapid repricing or withdrawal of insurance from flood-prone areas.

A federal program for restoring damaged forests is out of money, leaving landowners hit by recent extreme weather disasters out of pocket. The Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Forest Restoration Program has received more aid requests than it can honor, in part because the US$357mn Congress approved in 2024 was largely put aside for woodland devastated by that year’s active hurricane season. In northern Michigan, where a March 2025 ice storm damaged about three million acres, some 600 landowners are stuck in the aid application process. (Grist)

Arizona moved to join Nevada’s lawsuit against the Interior Department over a federal Colorado River plan that would slash allocations to the downstream states by hundreds of billions of gallons without curtailing usage by their upstream neighbors. The 10-year plan, starting in 2027, imposes reductions only on Lower Basin states, with Arizona losing 760,000 acre-feet of water, California 440,000, and Nevada 50,000. Upper Basin states face no mandatory cuts. Arizona says the plan breaches the Law of the River and could effectively dry up the Central Arizona Project, the state’s water delivery system. (Governor Katie Hobbs)

Virginia Democrat Representative James Walkinshaw introduced the Heat Island Reduction Act, which would require federal agencies to plan cooling upgrades for properties in areas thar fall short of federal smog standards. Agencies would have six months to identify heat-mitigation measures like installing shade trees, cool roofs, and cooler pavements, and another six to set out each project’s cost and implementation plan. The General Services Administration would report annually to Congress on spending and resulting changes in temperature and energy use. (Representative James Walkinshaw)

California regulators ordered mortgage lenders and servicers to disclose how they are handling insurance payouts to households impacted by the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, after homeowners complained that rebuilding funds were withheld. The Department of Financial Protection and Innovation has logged more than 160 complaints from fire victims, and is now investigating whether lenders are holding up payments to survivors, failing to implement appeals processes on decisions about releasing funds, or delaying payouts even after home loans are fully paid. Institutions found to be engaging in misconduct may be penalized under state and federal consumer protection laws. (California Department of Financial Protection & Innovation)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suspended its 65th plenary in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia without agreeing a timetable for its Seventh Assessment Report, making it unclear when the next review of climate science will land. About 30 countries, including European, Latin American, and small island states, want all three Working Group reports ready ahead of the 2028 Global Stocktake on climate action — including that on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. However, India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Kenya favor longer timelines. Chair Jim Skea halted talks after several developing country and small island delegations had left. No date has been set for a continuation. (IPCC)

Fewer than half of national biodiversity targets are on track for 2030, according to a UN-backed report published ahead of the international nature summit, COP17, in Armenia. Nearly 90% of the 196 signatories to the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework have set national targets, yet the goal to conserve 30% of land and seas is slipping. Protected areas cover just 18% of land and inland waters and 23% of national marine zones, while existing pledges would lift land coverage to just 27.5%. (Convention on Biological Diversity)

The Welsh Government set out plans to harden the country’s transport network against heat, flooding, storms and sea-level rise, after a summer of extreme heat disrupted road and rail travel. Deputy Transport Minister Mark Hooper said Transport for Wales and Network Rail will step up inspections and improve train cooling reliability, while bus franchising will factor overheating and flood exposure into fleet renewal. In addition, the government will extend resilience and adaptation training to all 22 local authorities to manage impacts to the road network. (Welsh Government)

Microsoft Research has released an open-source machine-learning framework that corrects systematic errors in weather models, helping improve the accuracy of weather forecasts two-to-six-weeks out.

The framework, Probabilistic Bias Correction (PBC), studies a model’s historical forecasts and adjusts the probabilities it produces to counteract ingrained biases. The result is more accurate forecasts beyond 10 days when applied to either physics- or AI-based models.

According to a paper in Nature, PBC improved the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ leading debiased sub-seasonal model on 98% of rainfall targets and 92% of temperature targets. It also doubled the accuracy of ECMWF’s AI Forecasting System.

The winning entry in ECMWF’s AI Weather Quest — an international competition aimed at improving forecast accuracy — was built on PBC. It beat six operational forecasting centers and 34 teams on every variable and lead time, and flagged this January’s Winter Storm Fern 22 days before it struck.

Microsoft says the Kenya Meteorological Service Authority is using PBC this rainy season to weigh the odds of very heavy or very light rain for smallholder farms that depend on rainfall for their crops.

Wildfire and catastrophe property insurer Stand raised a US$70mn Series C to build out its platform for making homes more resilient and insurable. The round was led by Saga Ventures with participation from Lowercarbon, Eclipse, and Equal Ventures, among others. The company says the value of property it insures has grown tenfold to US$10bn in a year. (Stand Insurance)

The US Department of Energy opened applications for Phase 2 of WISE Utilities, a program that gives electric utilities free access to wildfire risk tools and analytics. This phase is intended to offer support across the “wildfire management lifecycle”, from prevention to response and recovery. including prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The first phase worked with eight utilities, including rural cooperatives, public utility districts, and municipal systems. Applications close November 10, and assistance begins in January 2027. DOE has not said how many utilities the second phase will support. (US Department of Energy)

The European Space Agency (ESA) picked Planet Labs’ Slovenian subsidiary Sinergise to build an automated satellite system that orders high-resolution imaging as climate-related hazards emerge. The 12-month pilot, part of ESA’s Space Resilience Node, will leverage open source climate data from Copernicus data and use Planet Labs’ PlanetScope imagery to spot unfolding disasters. When hazards of a certain type and severity are detected, the system requests detailed images, including from Planet’s Pelican fleet, and sends them to the map view of Slovenia’s civil protection administration within hours. (Planet Labs)

Swedish agtech start-up OlsAro raised a €5mn (US$5.7mn) seed round to scale its AI-powered platform for breeding climate-resilient cereals. The company synthesizes new traits and licenses them to seed companies, which can use them to strengthen the ensuing crops. Its salt-tolerant wheat yielded up to 41% more than a moderately tolerant variety in saline trials in Bangladesh. The new funds will back drought-tolerance and nitrogen-efficiency programs. Industrifonden and Nordic Foodtech VC co-led the round.(Tech Funding News)

ThermoShade, a start-up making passive radiative cooling panels for outdoor shade, has been listed as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026. The company’s patented cooling panels combine a reflective surface, phase-change material, and specialized insulation, which it claims can make shaded spaces feel up to 20°F cooler than under conventional shade. Deployments this year include a Los Angeles Metro pilot with the LA Cleantech Incubator and farm trials with Cornell University and Fresno State. (Thermoshade)

Almost all research using AI to manage extreme heat focuses on prediction, while little addresses emergency response or recovery, according to a review in Climate Risk Management co-authored by RAND researcher Karishma Patel. Of the papers reviewed, 98.4% dealt with prediction, against 10.4% on response, 3.2% on recovery, and 1.6% on preparedness. The authors call it a research-to-implementation gap. (Climate Risk Management)

Tanzanian tech tool CLIMAID won the UN’s AI for Climate Action Award 2026. The open-source platform organizes climate, satellite, and household-level vulnerability data to craft localized drought predictions, extreme weather early warnings, and adaptation plans. The UN says it has potential to aid climate-vulnerable countries where access to timely and credible climate data is challenging. (UNFCCC)

Gaffer and duct tape keep floodwater out of homes far better than sandbags, according to tests commissioned by Flood Re, the UK’s government-backed flood reinsurance scheme. University of Hull researchers flooded a range of doors to depths of 600mm. Synthetic rubber tape cut leakage by 99% against an unprotected door, duct tape by up to 98% and sandbags by just 70%. Even the weakest tape reduced it by 80%. Sandbags also proved hard to deploy and dispose of when contaminated with sewage. (BBC)

Social vulnerability amplifies global inequality in urban heat risk (Communications Earth & Environment)

Rising global population co-exposure to heatwaves and landscape fire-sourced air pollution (Science Advances)

Out of the frying pan, into the fire? Tradeoffs between drought adaptation and wildfire risk under cropland loss and urbanization in the western United States (Environmental Research and Letters)

The 2026 state of the climate report: challenges and opportunities (Bioscience)

Accelerating adaptation delivery: Why the Adaptation Accelerator Hub and NAP Implementation Alliance matter now (CMCC)

Declining water storage and rising risk: considerations on implications for hydropower and water security (JRC)

A risk in flux: Exploring Europe’s changing flood reality for insurers (Gallagher Re)

Effect of climate change at least as large as El Niño in strengthening Hurricane Polo (World Weather Attribution)

The mortality costs of climate change (CEPR VoxEU)

Who is at high risk from climate hazards? A new map to explore exposure and vulnerability (World Bank)

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor