Advances in resilience tech present a huge opportunity for addressing climate impacts and building the market for solutions. Communicating across potential users early on, and building out a systems approach to planning and financing resilience will help boost the impact of technological innovation. These were key themes throughout DC Climate Week during three days of panels and workshops hosted by Duke University. They focused on different dimensions of climate resilience, including resilient infrastructure, university-driven innovation and translating risk mitigation benefits into financial signals. Tailwind Futures co-hosted the event focused on bringing university research to market.
Data Innovations Inform Resilience Investment
The first event, “Built to Endure – Advancing Infrastructure Resilience from the Ground Up,” highlighted the value of harnessing data and technology to inform resilience planning and financing. It built on findings from a recent Duke publication co-authored with industry partners titled “Built to Endure: A Smart Guide for US Cities to Build Resilient Infrastructure that Lasts.” For example, making a digital twin so a community can explore its potential future flood risks allows residents to see how their favorite playground or commute route may be affected by changing conditions. This empowers community members to make their own informed planning decisions and also helps earn support for bond measures to build resilience.
Cities are also adopters of innovative new resilience technology and the discussions pointed out the opportunity presented by small to mid-sized cities. While they may have fewer resources, they also tend to have fewer legacy systems in place and may be more open to innovative approaches. Such communities can be important partners in piloting innovations on their way to scale.
University-originated Tech Can Address Climate Impacts
The need for pilots was a motif in the discussion at the event we co-hosted on Tuesday, “How Universities Can Work with Investors and Industry to Bring Resilience Innovation to Market.” The bias towards proven solutions in both industry and public sector users of resilience technology presents a barrier to scaling innovative approaches. However, pilots and real field demonstrations can go a long way. Likewise, there is an opportunity to leverage existing technologies in innovative ways to address climate impacts. Resilience technologies span all industries and research departments.
This was a key point in my opening presentation, “The Adaptation & Resilience Market Opportunity.” I shared Tailwind’s Adaptation & Resilience Taxonomy, explaining how university researchers or founders can use the tool to identify how their research or products apply to climate resilience and frame their work in ways that resonate with relevant industries. I also shared highlights from our ongoing Resilience Game Changers research project examining cutting edge university research, its potential to address climate impacts and pathways to commercialization.
While university technology transfer offices usually maintain public lists of their technologies, they acknowledged that there is an opportunity to reframe this list in language that appeals to venture capital and highlights the potential innovative uses of the technology. This workshop made it clear that university technology transfer offices are true to their name. They want to get their universities’ technologies out into the world, which means they are excited to explore potential new users and approaches.
The workshop participants highlighted both a need and an appetite for expanded communication between these university technology offices, research faculty, venture capital and potential industry users. Acknowledging that tech is not ready for VC until years after its time getting licensed at the patent office, many investors are still interested in watching university originated tech closely. Meanwhile, there is significant difference between a research project with an end goal of a Nature article and one that’s end goal is to produce a commercializable project. Bringing up commercialization as a real pathway for students and researchers and sharing insight about how investors look at new tech can help pave the way for more technical innovations to come to market as usable products.
Identifying Shared Terms for Risk-Mitigation Benefits Will Help Resilience Scale
As the need for products that address the impacts of climate change grows, so does the need to align terminology and incentives in the market so that potential users know what to look for and stronger demand signals can emerge. This was the topic of the final workshop on “Translating Risk Reduction into Investment Signals.”
Measuring physical climate risks has improved significantly and now measuring the impact of resilience pre-implementation is key. This enables smoother integration into capital planning, design decisions and investment committees. This workshop had a wide-range of participants from insurance and architecture firms, investors and lenders, public agencies, NGOs and others.
While there was general acknowledgement that resilience is important across industries, it’s evident that the variety of terms and metrics in different fields makes it challenging to align incentives and agree on priorities. There is a need to identify shared goals across sectors. For example, one participant shared her experience helping a transportation agency integrate resilience into capital planning. The project looked at different dimensions of risks and benefits to define a broad set of “critical assets.” This included assets critical for continuity in regional travel routes, as well as tolling infrastructure important for revenue. The agency then rolled resilience retrofits into deferred maintenance capital planning for these assets.
The workshop also identified humans as a critical component of resilience, with people really underpinning all assets and businesses. This is true regardless of if an industry primarily speaks in financial terms, engineering analysis or health metrics. For example, there are examples of manufacturing facilities closing after hurricanes, not because they are damaged but because their employees couldn’t commute to work. Even for industries that don’t rely on onsite operations the increasingly distributed workforce creates a new set of distributed points of failure for companies to plan for.
Innovative approaches to connecting these dots and drawing lines between different ways of assessing and quantifying resilience benefits is essential as we strive to scale the technological innovations that help address climate impacts for businesses and the people they rely on.
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Tailwind Futures is an investment firm and ecosystem builder focused on resilience technology. We co-hosted the event, “How Universities Can Work with Investors and Industry to Bring Resilience Innovation to Market,” as part of our Resilience Game Changers research project funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation. Our forthcoming report on Resilience Game Changers will map the broader landscape of hard-tech academic research and development relevant to adaptation and resilience and examine pathways to commercialization.
Reach out to us if you’d like to discuss technological innovations that help corporations futureproof the infrastructure, workforce, and supply chain of today and tomorrow.