Climate Adaptation and Heart Disease

In late 2020, I purchased a home in Sonoma County. Three weeks later the Glass Fire broke out — mandatory evacuation, Cal Fire staged at the top of my street (I was fortunate and my home was OK). I’m not alone, 1 in 6 Americans lives in an area with significant wildfire risk. This incident woke me up to the significant impact climate change is having on our lives and I made a promise to myself to find a way to contribute to solutions. About a year and a half later, I started to make good on this promise by investing and advising early stage climate tech companies. And I observed that many climate-focused VCs would not touch adaptation. That is, they would not invest in companies that help us live with the impacts of climate change. Why?

Generated by AI

A Few Definitions

Mitigation — Mitigation refers to solutions that slow down or reverse climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Solutions include everything from carbon capture and storage to renewable energy to circular economy and climate finance.

Adaptation — If the aim of mitigation work is to prevent the environment from changing, then adaptation solutions strive to help people live in an altered environment. It covers everything from helping farmers grow crops with less rainfall to making sure buildings can withstand flooding events to creating new systems to predict asset risk.

Why The Disdain For Adaptation?

Why do many VCs and climate experts treat adaptation as the red headed step child of the climate ecosystem? It boils down to two main reasons.

1. Diverts Resources — The longstanding argument in the climate community goes something like this: we need to reduce/remove greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in order to reach climate goals and any other activity is a distraction. Many climate-focused firms have a formal or informal requirement around CO2 reduction, removal or avoidance. If a company doesn’t help meet that they are unlikely to talk to them.
2. Creates Moral Hazard — Some go a step further and argue that investing in adaptation measures perpetuates the problem by allowing people to have a crutch of sorts and continue greenhouse gas emitting behaviors. In 1992, Al Gore said that “adaptation is a kind of laziness.”

I can understand why someone might say that in 1992 but since that time, the impacts of climate change have not just gotten dramatically worse, they’ve gotten very real:

• Weather-related power outages increased by 67% in the last 2 decades and are estimated to have cost the U.S. economy an (inflation-adjusted) annual average of $18 billion to $33 billion.
• 41M people live in flood prone areas in the US and greater rainfall has made what used to be a 100-year flood event, in places like Houston, more like a 25-year event.
• Floods alone are estimated to cost US businesses $49B annually.
• 2021 (denoted with red line on the graph below) marked the seventh consecutive year (2015–2021) in which 10 or more separate billion-dollar disaster events have impacted the U.S. The 1980–2021 annual average (black line below) is 7.4 events; the annual average for the most recent 5 years (‘17-’21, pink line below) is 17.2 events.

Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

These are just the US-centric statistics. When you zoom out and look at the entire world it’s easy to understand why the UN is imploring member nations to do more on adaptation.

These arguments against adaptation were the same arguments used to discourage work on carbon removal and now we know we need it to reach our climate goals and are playing catch up.

Heart Disease and Climate Adaptation

In case you’re not yet convinced that we need to work on both mitigation and adaptation at the same time, think about heart disease.

Heart disease was responsible for 20% of deaths in the US in 2020, according to the CDC. So it’s for good reason that we spend a lot of money trying to prevent heart disease. But we don’t tell people currently suffering from heart disease, “sorry, we can’t deal with this, it’s a distraction from making progress on prevention.” No, we invest in both prevention and treatment. And climate investments should function the same way. We are in a “yes, and” situation. An “everything, everywhere, all at once” type of situation.

It’s time to be pragmatic and actively encourage new adaptation-focused solutions.

Interesting Adaptation-Focused Areas

Here are few adaptation-focused areas that I’m personally excited about:

• Early Warning and Monitoring systems — knowing what’s happening and when is the first step to finding solutions. Companies like Pano for wildfires and Airly for air quality monitoring make this possible.
• Risk Planning and Resilience — we’re in an age where the physical, economic and people-related risks associated with climate events are tangible and changing quickly. How could supply chains be disrupted? How should real estate investors value current and potential properties as it relates to climate risks? How can utilities better understand their asset and customer risks? How does a company integrate biodiversity considerations into its business strategy? How will employees be impacted? These questions don’t have static answers.

This means climate adaptation has to become a permanent and integrated part of enterprise risk management, strategic planning and investment decision making. Companies like Zesty and Tomorrow are doing interesting work here, but it’s early and many other promising startups are entering the space.

• Rethinking Financial Instruments — as weather-related events become more common we need to rethink the products offered to protect humans, agriculture, structures and animals. Maybe this means new types of insurance and what Floodbase and Demex are doing to allow for this is super interesting. And perhaps there are also other financial tools to support economies affected by these events.
• Better Solutions for the Built Environment — Creating more climate and weather resilient materials for indoor and outdoor. Inventions I could only dream of like permeable pavement — designed to allow water to infiltrate through it and into the ground, rather than running off into storm drains. This helps to reduce the risk of flooding and improve water quality. And many have heard of the world’s whitest paint which can cool surfaces by up to 19℉ compared to their surroundings.
• More Efficient Food Production — we have to feed 10B people by 2050 — nearly 2B more than we need to feed today — and we have to do without a requisite increase in land or water use. This will mean higher yielding crops grown with less water. One piece of the solution is faster problem detection so that you get higher yield — InnerPlant is working on this for crops and BeeHero for the famed and much needed bee population (needed for 75% of crops).

These are just a few examples. I didn’t even touch on healthcare or water. And I’m sure there are many more that I missed.

I’m genuinely excited about mitigation and investing there. AND I‘m absolutely certain we must also focus on adaptation. We need prevention and treatment.

If you’re working on these solutions please reach out (on almost any platform other than LinkedIn).