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The more Hurricanes Helene and Milton we get, the harder it is to ignore the need.
As the southeastern U.S. recovers from hurricanes Helene and Milton, the destruction the storms have left behind serves to underline the obvious: The need for technologies that support climate change adaptation and resilience is both real and urgent. And while nearly all the money in climate finance still flows into mitigation tech, which seeks to lower emissions to alleviate tomorrow’s harm, at long last, there are signs that interest and funding for the adaptation space is picking up.
The emergence and success of climate resilience advisory and investment firms such as Tailwind Climate and The Lightsmith Group are two signs of this shift. Founded just last year, Tailwind recently published a taxonomy of activities and financing across the various sectors of adaptation and resilience solutions to help clients understand opportunity areas in the space. Next year, the firm’s co-founder Katie MacDonald told me, Tailwind will likely begin raising its first fund. It’s already invested in one company, UK-based Cryogenx, which makes a portable cooling vest to rapidly reduce the temperature of patients experiencing heatstroke.
As for Lightsmith, the firm held the final close of its $186 million growth equity fund for climate adaptation solutions in 2022, which co-founder and managing director Jay Koh told me is one of the first, if not the first fund with a climate resilience focus. As Koh sees it, the evolution of climate adaptation and resilience technologies can be broken up into three stages, the first being “reactive and incremental.” That’s largely where we’re at right now, he said — think rebuilding a dam higher after it’s been breached in a flood, or making a firebreak broader after a destructive wildfire. Where he’s seeing interesting companies emerge, though, is in the more proactive second stage, which often involves anticipating and preparing for extreme weather events. “Let’s do a lot more data and analytics ahead of time. Let’s deploy more weather satellites. Let’s look at deploying artificial intelligence and other technologies to do better forecasting,” Koh explained to me.
The third and final stage, he said, could be categorized as “systemic or transcendent adaptation,” which involves systems-level changes as opposed to incremental improvements. Source Global, one of Lightsmith’s portfolio companies which makes solar-powered hydropanels that produce affordable drinking water, is an example of this. As Koh told me, “It’s not simply improving the efficiency of desalination filters by 5% or 10%. It’s saying, listen, we’re going to pull water out of the air in a way that we have never done before.”
But while the activity and interest around adaptation tech may be growing, the money just isn’t there yet. “We’re easily $50 [billion] to $60 billion below where we need to be today,” MacDonald told me. “And you know, we’re on the order of around $150 [billion] to $160 billion below where we need to be by 2030.” Everyone else I spoke with echoed the sentiment. “The latest statistics are that less than 5% of total climate finance tracked on planet Earth is attributable to adaptation and climate resilience,” Koh said. “Of that, less than 2% is private investment.”
There’s a few reasons why early-stage investors especially may be hesitant to throw their weight behind adaptation tech despite the clear need in the market. Amy Francetic, co-founder and managing general partner at Buoyant Ventures, which focuses on early-stage digital solutions for climate risk, told me that the main customer for adaptation solutions is often a government entity. “Municipalities and other government contracts, they’re hard to win, they’re slow to win, and they don’t pay that much, either, which is the problem.” Francetic told me. “So it’s not a great customer to have.”
One of Buoyant’s portfolio companies, the now defunct StormSensor, reinforced this lesson for Francetic. The company used sensors to track water flow within storm and sewage systems to prevent flooding and was able to arrange pilot projects with plenty of water agencies — but few of them converted into paying contracts. “The municipalities were willing to spend money on an experiment, but not so many of them had a larger budget.” Francetic told me. The same dynamic, she said, is also at play in the utility industry, where you often hear about new tech succumbing to “death by pilot.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, when it comes to working with larger, risk-averse agencies. AiDash, another of Lightsmith’s portfolio companies that uses artificial intelligence to help utilities assess and address wildfire risk, has five utility partnerships, and earlier this year raised $58.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C round. Francetic and MacDonald both told me they’re seeing the conversation around climate adaptation evolve to include more industry stakeholders. In the past, Francetic said, discussing resilience and adaptation was almost seen as a form of climate doomerism. “They said, oh, why are you doing that? It shows that you’re giving up.” But now, MacDonald told me that her experience at this year’s climate week in New York was defined by productive conversations with representatives from the insurance industry, banking sector, and venture capital arena about injecting more capital into the space.
Bill Clerico, the founder and managing partner of the venture firm Convective Capital, is also deeply familiar with the tricky dynamics of climate adaptation funding. Convective, founded in 2022, is solely dedicated to wildfire tech solutions. The firm’s portfolio companies span a range of technologies that address suppression, early identification, prevention, and insurance against damages, and are mainly looking to work with utilities, governments, and insurance companies. When I talked to Clerico back in August, he (understatedly) categorized these establishments as “not necessarily the most fast-moving or innovative.” But the bleak silver lining, he told me, is that extreme weather is forcing them to up their tempo. “There is so much destruction happening so frequently that it’s forcing a lot of these institutions to think about it totally differently and to embrace newer, more novel solutions — and to do it quickly.”
People, it seems, are starting to get real. But investors and startups alike are also just beginning to define exactly what adaptation tech encompasses and what metrics for success look like when they’re less measurable than, say, the tons of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere via direct air capture, or the amount of energy produced by a fusion reactor.
“Nobody wakes up in the morning and buys a loaf of adaptation. You don’t drive around in an adaptation or live in an adaptation,” Koh noted. “What you want is food, transport, shelter, water that is resilient and adapted to the effects of climate change.” What Koh and the team at Lightsmith have found is that many of the companies working on these solutions are hiding in plain sight. “They call themselves business continuity or water efficiency or agricultural precision technologies or supply chain management in the face of weather volatility,” Koh explained.
In this way, the scope of adaptation technology balloons far beyond what is traditionally climate-coded. Lightsmith recently invested in a Brazil-based digital health company called Beep Saude, which enables patients to get rapid, in-home diagnostics, vaccination services, and infusion therapies. It falls under the umbrella of climate adaptation tech, Koh told me, because rising temperatures, increased rainfall, and deforestation in the country have led to a rapid increase in mosquitoes spreading diseases such as dengue fever and the Zika virus.
Naturally, measuring the efficacy of solutions that span such a vast problem space means a lot of customization. “Your metric might be, how many people have asked for water in a drought-prone area?” MacDonald told me. “And with health, it might be, how many children are safe from wildfire smoke during fire season? And for ecosystems, it might be, how many hectares of ecosystem have been saved as a means to reduce storm surge?” Insurance also brings up a host of additional metrics. As Francetic told me, “we measure things like lives and livelihoods covered or addressed. We measure things like losses covered or underwriting dollars spent on this.”
No matter how you categorize it or measure it, the need for these technologies is not going away. “The drivers of adaptation and climate resilience demand are physics and time,” Koh told me. “Whoever develops climate resilience and adaptation technology will have a competitive advantage over any other company, any other society, and the faster that we can scale it up, and the smarter and more equitable we are about deploying it, the better off we will all be.”
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.