As climate risks intensify, understanding their financial implications is becoming critical for businesses, investors, and homeowners alike. Ed Kearns, Chief Science Officer at First Street, joins Climate Rising to explain how climate data is being translated into actionable financial risk insights. The conversation explores how First Street models physical climate risks—including flooding, wildfire, and extreme weather—and translates them into property-level financial impacts. Ed discusses why traditional tools like FEMA flood maps fall short in a changing climate, and how new approaches combine physics-based modeling with high-resolution data. The episode also examines how climate risk is reshaping real estate markets, insurance systems, and investment decisions, and why transparency is driving a fundamental shift in how risk is priced. Ed reflects on the growing demand for climate risk intelligence and the role of both private markets and public policy in adapting to a warming world.

Climate Risk Meets Finance: Modeling the Future of Real Estate with First Street

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As climate risks intensify, understanding their financial implications is becoming critical for businesses, investors, and homeowners alike. Ed Kearns, Chief Science Officer at First Street, joins Climate Rising to explain how climate data is being translated into actionable financial risk insights. The conversation explores how First Street models physical climate risks—including flooding, wildfire, and extreme weather—and translates them into property-level financial impacts. Ed discusses why traditional tools like FEMA flood maps fall short in a changing climate, and how new approaches combine physics-based modeling with high-resolution data. The episode also examines how climate risk is reshaping real estate markets, insurance systems, and investment decisions, and why transparency is driving a fundamental shift in how risk is priced. Ed reflects on the growing demand for climate risk intelligence and the role of both private markets and public policy in adapting to a warming world.          

Climate Rising is about the impact of climate change on business. It brings business and policy leaders and Harvard Business School faculty together to share insights about what businesses are doing, can do, and should do to confront climate change. It explores the many challenges and opportunities that climate change raises for managers, such as decisions about where they choose to locate, the technologies they develop and use, their strategies with respect to products, marketing, customer engagement, and policy—in other words, the full spectrum of business concerns.

Climate Rising

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