The Adaptation Turning Points of 2025

For better and for worse, 2025 was a big year for climate adaptation.

Monumental extreme weather events crystallized the human, economic, and financial costs of a hotter, wilder world. Policy upheavals in Washington and Brussels changed the public-private balance on climate spending and preparedness virtually overnight. And headline names in finance and big business raised funds and set up new practices to advance the cause of climate protection and preparedness.

In this end-of-year edition of Climate Proof, we list our top ten adaptation turning points of 2025, and how they transformed the tech, policy, and finance dynamics around this most urgent of priorities.

But we haven’t got a monopoly on wisdom. That’s why we’re asking you to share your top adaptation turning points — and to vote on which of ours you agree with. We’ll share the findings in the new year. Scroll to the bottom to fill in the survey!

Understanding the past is the key to solving the problems of the future. We hope this recap helps you take stock of where climate adaptation stands today, and get ready to shape the agenda in the year to come.

The Los Angeles wildfires marked a brutal inflection point for climate adaptation in 2025, becoming the costliest wildfire event ever recorded globally with insured losses topping US$40bn. The scale of destruction reflected a confluence of human and environment-related changes: hotter, drier conditions and extreme winds driven by climate change, combined with decades of housing expansion into California’s most fire-prone wildland-urban interface. But the fires also exposed something more systemic: the fragility of the state’s US$15bn homeowners insurance market. Years of mispriced wildfire risk have pushed major insurers to retreat, funneling homeowners into the state’s FAIR Plan and leaving a staggering US$1.35-$2trn protection gap between wildfire exposure and available coverage. California’s early efforts to modernize insurance regulation through much-needed reforms now look like too little, too late. The fires underscored that adaptation at scale will require far more than better pricing: it will demand coordinated investment in risk reduction, land-use reform, and new public-private financing models.

The Trump administration’s assault on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) this year was unprecedented, and threatens to unravel the nation’s already-fragile disaster safety net just as climate risks intensify. Almost immediately after sweeping into office, Trump oversaw deep staffing cut, the installation of unqualified leaders, and fired the starting gun for a reform agenda that would hollow out the federal government’s capacity to prepare for and recover from floods, fires, and storms. Billions of dollars in promised adaptation funding were frozen or rescinded — although a recent court victory may see some of these reinstated — and payouts to desperate states and localities appear increasingly to be conditional on perceived political support for the Trump agenda.

Here’s Laurie Schoeman, a former Senior Advisor for Climate Risk and Resilience at the Biden White House and long-time champion of US climate adaptation policy, with her reflections on this turning point:

One highly anticipated outcome of this year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil was agreement on a set of indicators for measuring national and international progress towards the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) — one of the central planks of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Frustratingly for COP-watchers, however, the end-agreement reached at Belém left much to be desired. The conference ended up adopting a slimmed-down and politically massaged set of 59 indicators — down from 100 technically vetted metrics proposed by experts — overriding objections from the EU and many developing countries. The final list covers basics such as water stress, climate-resilient agriculture and risk assessments, and includes a handful of finance indicators, but critics say key elements of the Paris Agreement’s adaptation targets are now left unmeasured. Here’s what Timo Leiter, a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics and a member of the technical expert group that proposed the initial 100-strong list, had to say:

The dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — orchestrated by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency — marked one of the most consequential setbacks for climate adaptation finance in the Global South in living memory, abruptly removing a pillar of global resilience finance. The near-erasure of USAID severed funding for climate-proofing projects across the Global South —from water security in Peru to agricultural resilience in Colombia — and undermined a sophisticated ecosystem of blended-finance deals that had helped crowd in private capital. The agency’s destruction also left specialist funds, consultancies, and on-the-ground implementing partners scrambling — and left hundreds of seasoned climate and development experts in Washington out of a job.

Here’s what Sashi Jayatileke, former Senior Climate Finance Advisor at USAID and now Senior Director at the World Climate Foundation, had to say:

The first images from NISAR — the joint NASA–India Synthetic Aperture Radar launched in July — revealed a vast new trove of data that scientists, policymakers, and businesses can tap to shape climate adaptation strategies. The satellite, which scans almost all the land and ice on Earth every 12 days, is capable of bringing into focus centimeter-scale changes to surface conditions in near-real-time. The mission promises an unprecedented baseline for tracking floods, droughts, permafrost thaw, subsidence, and infrastructure stress as climate impacts accelerate. Early images from Maine’s coastline and North Dakota farmland showcased the satellite’s ability to distinguish forests, wetlands, crops and built surfaces with razor-sharp clarity, and revealed how soil moisture and land deformation — among other things — can now be monitored at resolutions useful to planners, insurers and emergency managers.

Here’s what Tee Barr, Co-Founder of Geospatial Risk and Principal Consultant at the Climate Geospatial Intelligence Group, had to say:

When Hurricane Melissa tore across Jamaica in late October, it delivered unprecedented destruction. It also offered a rare proof-point for a popular corner of disaster finance. Within days of the category-5 storm, the government announced rapid financial relief, including a record US$92mn payout from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility and a full $150mn payout on a World Bank–arranged catastrophe bond. Funds from the latter were disbursed on December 1. The speed matters: liquidity arrived while damage assessments were still underway, allowing emergency response and early recovery to move immediately. The episode marks a turning point for disaster finance — and the cat bond market specifically — as it shows how sovereign governments overseeing climate-vulnerable states can leverage innovative financial structures that are popular with sophisticated global investors.

The European Union got serious about hardening itself against climate shocks this year, launching a sweeping climate risk and resilience initiative that promises to give adaptation real legal teeth for the first time. Framed as an “integrated framework” to confront floods, fires, heatwaves, and other shocks, the effort signals a quiet admission in Brussels: previous attempts to align legislation and policy to address the challenges of the world’s fastest-warming continent have fallen short. The new plan, which was opened for public consultation on December 1, is designed to anchor resilience in binding laws, targets and investment rule.

Here’s what the European Commission had to say in launching the consultation:

A hard-fought deal at COP30 saw negotiators agree to triple international climate finance flows for adaptation by 2035, raising hopes that developing countries would receive more resources to deal with ever-escalating climate shocks. The tripling target replaces the US$40bn-by-2025 pledge made at COP26 and ensures a globally-agreed organizing principal for adaptation finance can be leveraged by poorer nations in future rounds of climate negotiations. Still, the agreement fell short of much-hyped expectations. The deal doesn’t define the baseline from which finance will be tripled, kicks the deadline well past the 2030 horizon sought by campaigners, and nests adaptation within a broader US$300bn climate finance goal that also covers mitigation.

Here’s what Kit England, Senior Climate Resilience and Adaptation Specialist at Paul Watkiss Associates, had to say:

It’s been quite the year for geospatial intelligence. It’s been an even bigger year for AI. Google put the two together with the launch of Earth AI this July. By fusing satellite imagery, population dynamics, and environmental forecasting through Gemini-powered agents, Google has made it possible to answer adaptation-critical questions — like where floods will hit, which population are most exposed, and how could critical infrastructure be affected —in a single analytical flow, and at planetary scale. Early results showcase its impressive capabilities, from sharper flood and storm forecasts to highly accurate predictions of the number of people and places at risk from encroaching hazards. For climate adaptation, the significance is less about raw AI performance and more about operational impact. Earth AI shrinks the time between signal and decision, enabling earlier warnings, better targeting of aid and capital, and more granular resilience planning.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government stuck a flag in the ground for adaptation finance this year, when in October is issued a €300mn resilience bond (US$350mn) — the first in the world certified under the Climate Bonds Resilience Taxonomy. The proceeds will fund the Tokyo Resilience Project, a century-long effort to fortify one the world’s largest city against floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and coastal hazards, using man-made and nature-based solutions. Investor demand was emphatic: the deal was more than seven times oversubscribed, with orders topping €2bn (US$2.3bn), highlighting the deep pool of capital ready to be deployed in resilience.

Email Climate Proof at [email protected] to share your top adaptation turning points of 2025. We’ll reveal the top choices in January!

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor