Singapore's GIC Touts Adaptation Opportunities, EU Grapples with Record-Breaking Blazes, Model Vendors Push New Wildfire Tools, and More

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GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, sees climate adaptation investment opportunities more than quadrupling — from US$2trn in 2025 to US$9trn by 2050 — with about 60% of that potential still untapped, the fund said in its annual report.

“There is a growing opportunity set in climate adaptation and resilience as solution providers emerge to help manage the impacts of higher temperatures and a more volatile climate,” the report reads. 

Roughly US$3trn of the projected growth stems directly from further global warming. GIC is targeting companies strengthening the built environment, including providers of weather-resilient building materials, and tracks their performance to guide future allocations. The adaptation market-sizing analysis was first published by GIC in May last year.

Climate adaptation companies are already outperforming traditional capital-goods peers on profitability. Firms deriving at least half their revenue from adaptation activities posted higher EBIT margins and stronger operating cash flow relative to assets than the MSCI ACWI Capital Goods index between 2018 and 2027 on a consensus-forecast basis, GIC’s research found. The fund expects the sector to keep expanding as insurers reprice risk, building codes tighten and corporate resilience rules multiply.

On physical risk, GIC has built a formal framework that separates portfolio holdings into two camps: assets with high physical risk exposure, which face monitoring for risk-management action and possible divestment, and adaptation-and-resilience solution providers, where GIC backs opportunities with clear demand and attractive valuations. The fund also evaluates and supports companies implementing credible adaptation strategies, weighing adaptation costs against potential damage, insurance coverage, holding periods and buyer expectations.

The fund also acknowledges in its annual report that the world is unlikely to hit the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C or 2°C targets, reinforcing the need for closer attention to near-term physical risks.

Realtor.com analysis finds nearly one-quarter of US homes, worth US$11.2trn, sit in areas of severe or extreme wind, flood, or wildfire risk — yet demand in the most exposed markets is holding at or above that of safer areas nearby. For example, in Los Angeles severe/extreme risk homes priced at 75% of their lower risk counterparts draw 23% more views per property, suggesting affordability trumps climate risk concerns. However, costs are rising for homeowners in high climate risk zones, with the median monthly HOA fees for condos and townhouses in these neighborhoods now reaching US$548, nearly 57% higher than the US$350 in lower risk areas. The metro areas where climate risk adds the most to HOA costs are Portland, Oregon, Washington, DC, Seattle, Washington, and Columbus, Ohio. (Realtor.com)

New York State and its municipalities face US$519bn in climate adaptation costs through 2050, according to a first-of-its-kind inventory from Rebuild by Design and the NYS Adaptation Practitioners Network. Average per capita costs for climate-proof infrastructure come to US$26,000 statewide, but are nearly double for New York City, where expensive sewer upgrades and coastal defenses are necessary. While the state passed a US$4.2bn Environmental Bond Act in 2022 to pay for climate investments, just US$2.2bn has been allocated so far. (Rebuild by Design)

The US Army Corps of Engineers has put a US$10bn price tag on defending Boston from sea-level rise, recommending roughly 16 miles of floodwalls, berms, levees, and storm-surge barriers across multiple neighborhoods. The Corps estimates inaction would expose the city to about US$54bn in flood damages between 2040 and 2090. By completing the study, Boston qualifies for federal funding to cover 65% of the build, with the remainder falling to city, state, and private stakeholders. (WBUR)

Europe’s June heatwave stripped more than €2bn (US$2.3bn) from the value of the continent’s grain crop, with France and Hungary sustaining the worst losses. The study from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit estimates lost production amounts to some 5% of 2025 production value. Temperatures topping 43°C in France and 40°C in Hungary struck during the critical kernel-filling window, eliminating 9mn tonnes from grain production forecasts for the year according to Coceral, the European grain traders’ association. (Financial Times)

Turkish bank Garanti BBVA closed a US$30mn sustainable bond on June 29 dedicated entirely to climate adaptation and resilience, marking one of the first such instruments in international debt markets. The 371-day note, issued under BBVA's Sustainable Debt Financing Framework, will fund water infrastructure, flood prevention and stormwater systems, disaster-resilient public works and early warning systems across Turkey. Proceeds will also go towards post-disaster reconstruction and utility digitalization. (BBVA)

The Green Finance Institute, WWF and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology published a methodology for Nature-Positive Transition Pathways, designed to direct private capital toward UK sectors meeting government environmental targets. Built with input from the UK government and more than 60 businesses and financial institutions, the framework links sector-specific actions to quantified biodiversity outcomes and is designed to guide investor decision-making on investing in nature, nature-friendly technologies, and resilient business models. (WWF)

A strengthening “super El Niño” could shave up to US$20bn off Africa’s most vulnerable economies, the African ​Development Bank’s top climate expert told Reuters. The climate system, on track to be the strongest recorded, could throttle the continent’s GDP by 1-2%, said Anthony Nyong, with spillover effects for government finances and infrastructure budgets. The extreme weather and high temperature expected could also trigger mass migration out of drought and flood zones. (Reuters)

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will take personal charge of the country’s engagement with the World Bank, assuming the role of UK Governor and attending the institution’s Annual and Spring Meetings. The move elevates climate finance within UK foreign policy, as the World Bank remains one of the largest sources of adaptation funding for the world’s poorest countries. (UK Government)

The European Union and member state governments are scrambling to respond to wildfires tearing through France and Spain — blazes that have already claimed 122,000 hectares of forest land and forced the evacuation of more than 300,000 people.

Under the bloc’s Civil Protection Mechanism, the EU has sent seven firefighting planes and four helicopters to France and six planes to Spain, along with support personnel and vehicles. “To the people of France and Spain: Europe will stand with you until the fires are out,” said Commissioner for Preparedness, Crisis Management and Equality, Hadja Lahbib.

However, Euractiv reports a European Commission official admitting that the “fires are faster than our capacity to try to put them out” and that the scale and ferocity of the blaze is “ten times over the capacity” of the available personnel and equipment deployed to tackle it. 

French President Macron has scheduled an emergency cabinet meeting today to orchestrate a nationwide response, pledging that his government would “be there for as long as is needed” in the affected regions. In France, the wildfires are nearing the south-western city of Bordeaux — a key wine-growing region — and over the weekend scorched land near the Cap Ferret peninsula, a popular tourist destination, triggering a full evacuation.

In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will visit areas torched by the fires in Valencia today. On Sunday, he again called for “a major public pact on the climate emergency” to adapt and build resilience.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani committed US$43.2mn across the city’s financial plan to expand the Bureau of Coastal Resilience from six to 75 staff, adding engineers, field crews, and planners to run the city’s growing flood-protection network. There are currently 15 active infrastructure projects in the Bureau’s portfolio, including the city’s first major coastal flood protection system: the US$1.45bn East Side Coastal Resiliency project. Mamdani’s funding package also funds studies toward a roadmap covering all 520 miles of the city’s coastline. (NYC Mayor’s Office)

Virginia's aquifers have essentially no spare capacity for new data centers, according to a study out of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. The agency modeled hypothetical 3mn-gallon-a-day withdrawals across the Virginia Coastal Plain and found only one site — in rural Northumberland County, far from existing data center clusters — could support enough water for a typical hyperscale campus without breaching permitting rules. Near the I-95 corridor, where most facilities are concentrated, availability approaches zero. The study, mandated by the state legislature, says regulators should have the power to deny a groundwater permit for a new, expanded, or renewed withdrawal in groundwater management areas, if the additional draw would deplete water levels in a confined aquifer below a critical point. In 2024, industrial draws on groundwater came to nearly 36 million gallons per day, on average. (Virginia Department of Environmental Quality)

The UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) will start throttling capacity on its four European interconnectors more often in the wake of June’s heatwave, which exposed vulnerabilities in cross-border power flows. NESO will decide a day ahead whether to cut volumes on links to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and France, spreading reductions evenly across all four. The move follows emergency measures in late June, when the UK was forced to halt exports as demand surged and wind generation fell across the region simultaneously. (Bloomberg)

ETH Zurich University has copied roughly 100 petabytes of NASA Earth-observation data — some 6 billion files — to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, a year-long transfer covering a range of climatic and extreme weather information. The purpose of the transfer was two-fold: to train foundation models for weather, climate, and natural-hazard prediction and to safeguard the archive amid deep US federal cuts to climate science and Earth-observation funding under the Trump administration. Researchers say NOAA datasets are next in line for copying. (RFI) 

Hot countries are unlikely to grow their power infrastructure enough to cool vulnerable populations using air-conditioning, a report from the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab says. Electricity use for cooling is projected to grow sevenfold faster in middle-income countries than low-income ones by 2050, as wealthier markets mature enough to fund air conditioning. On the flipside, some low-income countries will gain so little power that they will be unable to accommodate an increase in cooling. The report identifies 18 countries covering 676 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where extreme heat meets stalled electricity growth. In these countries, 377,000 people could die annually from heat exposure by 2050. (Climate Impact Lab)

Climate risk modeling start-ups KatRisk and Climate X each released wildfire risk platforms last week, as insurers and other financial institutions scramble to understand how runaway blazes threaten their bottom lines.

KatRisk unveiled new wildfire capabilities built on sister company Technosylva’s physics-based modeling platform, which is already being used by 40 major utilities. The system is capable of high-resolution wildfire spread modeling at 30-meter resolution across the continental US, and can also handle smoke modeling — using fire physics to estimate Air Quality Index impacts. The urban conflagration modeling component was built in concert with California’s fire agency (CALFIRE) and utility PG&E.

“The conditions driving catastrophic fire are evolving rapidly, yet many traditional approaches still rely heavily on historical views of risk,” said Martyn Sutton, General Manager of KatRisk. “By integrating operational fire behavior science directly into catastrophe analytics, we’re helping insurers better understand not just where fires have happened, but where catastrophic fire conditions may emerge next.”

Separately, Climate X released Global Wildfire, which claims to provide “the first consistent, globally applicable view of wildfire risk”. The probabilistic model covers 93% of global GDP across eight regions — addressing a gap in markets outside the major hotspots in the developed world. It also resolves outputs at the 30-meter resolution level.

Both platforms emphasize how they look beyond historical loss data and embrace forward-looking, scenario-based analytics. Climate X’s model runs projections to 2100 across multiple climate pathways, targeting underwriting needs among insurers and credit risk and regulatory stress-testing requirements for banks.

“For the first time, using Global Wildfire, institutions have defensible, globally consistent, location-level analytics that translate hazard into potential loss,” said Lukky Ahmed, Co-founder and CEO of Climate X.

Japanese industrial company Kubota has agreed to buy water-from-air harvesters from Delaware-based AirJoule for initial deployment in California and Texas — states that require developers to prove long-term water access before approval. Clustered AirJoule units would plug into Kubota’s water infrastructure systems to act as decentralized neighborhood water plants that produce, treat, and reuse supply locally – reducing new developments’ reliance on large existing water sources. (Kubota) 

A new AI model from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) can forecast ocean conditions months in advance using a fraction of the computing power required by traditional climate supercomputers, South Korean researchers claim. The system, called KIST-Ocean, correctly reproduced the powerful 2015-16 El Niño and in validation tests matched the accuracy of established forecasting systems despite running on a single computer chip. Scientists next plan to link the model with AI weather systems, aiming for a fully automated climate prediction tool. (ScienceAdvances)

Mozambique has stood up a permanent national drone capability for disaster response, financed by a US$967,000 grant from the African Development Bank's Korea-Africa Economic Cooperation Trust Fund and delivered with Korea's Busan Technopark. The program graduated its first 30 certified pilots and is built to deliver real-time flood assessment, early warning, and predictive flood modeling in a country repeatedly hit by cyclones and inundation. Emergency teams already flew live flood assessments during severe flooding earlier in 2026, the initiative’s first operational test. (African Review)

UK start-up Ponda has secured £2.35mn (US$3.1mn) to expand a peatland restoration model that doubles as flood defense infrastructure. The grant from the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs funds a 30-month project to create a 30-hectare demonstration site for growing typha, a wetland crop that can be used to make insulation for outdoor brands. The financing will also support a multi-company effort to show how productive wetland farming can create environmental and economic value and build out the UK biomaterials supply chain. (EU Startups)

Future tropical cyclone rainfall constrained by increased atmospheric dryness (Nature Geoscience)

Quantifying UK coastal flood exposure under future sea-level rise to 2300 (Nature Communications)

Measuring the social impacts of coastal flooding: a Danish example (Climatic Change)

Effect of financial inclusion and women empowerment on climate resilience: Evidence from sub-Saharan African households (Climate Risk Management)

Quantifying the role of climate change in driving mass coral bleaching (Oceanography)

Increasingly hot Europe faces more severe droughts and growing challenges for water and land management (World Weather Attribution)

Climate change’s heat tax on the UK’s labour force and economy (LSE Grantham)

Marine heatwave intensified impacts of Storm Babet by 9-20%, new study finds (UK Met Office)

National disaster insurance for all: Single-payer disaster insurance and community resilience investments for safer and more affordable housing (Gamechangers / University of Massachusetts)

Sustainable or maladaptive? A systematic review of climate adaptation strategies among smallholder farmers in SADC and South India (Systematic Review)

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor