Mike Williams On Scaling Real Estate Resilience

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  

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