Key Takeaways: Investing for Climate Resilience
This post summarizes insights from a conversation between Spencer Glendon, Founder of Probable Futures, a nonprofit climate literacy initiative, and Margret Trilli, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of ImpactAssests and ImpactAssets Capital Partners, that took place on Sept. 12. You can watch the full conversation here.

We know that our climate is changing quickly, and past can no longer be seen as precedent. Many regions of the world are growing warmer and more prone to drought, flooding and other extreme weather. Approximately 12,000 years of roughly stable weather patterns on our planet are shifting into something far different.
And yet, while a high percentage of the impact investing community is aware of these climate impacts, we often fall short in being able to convey these effects and convince others of their significance, particularly on a local level. Probable Futures is trying to solve for this, having created localized maps that show likely climate impacts by zip code.
“The good news is we have climate science that can tell us about what’s coming,” Glendon said. “People think this would be a big change, to start incorporating a forecast of climate into their work, and what I tell them is, no, you’re already using a forecast — you’re just [wrongly] assuming the past will continue.”
In the conversation between Glendon and Trilli, both underscored the urgency and relevance of the climate crisis to every last sector of society, and highlighted the role of investing in meeting the challenge of the moment — particularly when it comes to accelerating climate adaptation strategies.
Takeaway #1: Investors should be asking about climate change impacts as part of routine due diligence — even for climate solutions.
Surprisingly, even sustainable solutions are often not factoring in climate impacts. For instance, too many green infrastructure projects, such as the development of energy-saving heat pumps, are being built without regard to how climates are changing. The question of whether these heat pumps will even be needed in certain regions, as temperature ranges will be shifting in the coming decades, is too often not being asked.
“We are ‘solving climate change’ without considering climate change,” Glendon said. “This needs to be addressed.”
Investors must become aware of these types of emerging risks. And that means consistently asking entrepreneurs about how they are thinking about climate risk.
“Whenever you do due diligence, just ask a simple question: ‘How are you factoring in changing weather from climate change into your investments, and into your process?’” Glendon said.
Takeaway #2: Climate adaptation may be just as important as decarbonization, but since the goal isn’t as black and white, it remains an overlooked area by investors and businesses.
Glendon pointed to the example that in many olive-growing regions, winters are getting warmer. Since warmer air holds more moisture, it’s also more humid — and the plants are more prone to pests. The plants are also maturing much more quickly, yielding fewer and smaller fruit. As a result, unsurprisingly, many olive farmers are struggling.
“In every kind of farming business, there is some version of this happening,” Glendon said. He pointed to adaptation strategies — like enriching soil, introducing irrigation, experimenting with new pruning techniques, and improving weather-warning systems to better protect and ideally time harvests. “These are all forms of adaptation,” Glendon said. “None of them is super glamorous, none of them is a solution — but they’re all ways to make things better.”
Trilli seconded the importance of adaptation strategies — and pointed to their widespread underinvestment. She explained that ImpactAssets has extensively researched climate solutions with the goal of “[understanding] what role philanthropy and impact investing can play in filling gaps in the landscape.”
ImpactAssets’ work has focused on three high-level pillars: mitigation solutions that reduce emissions; adaptation and resilience solutions to help societies survive the unavoidable consequences; and an equitable transition to ensure that those most affected by climate change benefit from solutions. Trilli observed that “adaptation” seems to be getting short shrift from investors and business-minded problem-solvers generally.
“We are not seeing a whole lot of activity or even really hearing a lot of conversation on that second pillar of adaptation and resilience,” she said. Glendon heartily agreed with this diagnosis.
“[Adaptation] is messier,” he said. “It lacks the clarity of decarbonization, where zero is a virtuous goal — whereas in adaptation, doing nothing might be the right thing to do, in an informed way.” He added, “adaptation is categorically new; [we’ve] never replaced nature before. [We] just took nature for granted. And now we need a new process for substituting what nature gave us.”
Takeaway #3: Adaptation-focused investments must align with a just transition.
Trilli got right to the heart of why it’s necessary to build climate-related investments and solutions with a just transition in mind: “The consequences [of climate change] are not distributed equally,” she said.
This notion is highlighted in Probable Futures’ maps, where the Global South is shown to be increasingly susceptible to the most dangerous heat, droughts and extreme storms.
For example, Glendon pointed to Houston, Texas, where extreme weather has already picked up and where hot and increasingly humid temperatures will only intensify. Residents living in mobile homes, in which it’s especially difficult to control temperatures, will be especially vulnerable. These populations need extra consideration and resources to adapt to the changing climate.
Trilli explained that by overlaying Probable Futures’ maps that visualize localized climate patterns with Census tract data that can point to lowest-income areas, it’s possible to inform place-based investment strategies according to where the greatest needs will be.
Impact investors of all stripes can take the lead in encouraging the wider investment community to build this type of data and climate considerations into their due diligence and decision-making — thereby pushing industry leaders and entrepreneurs to create solutions with climate models in mind.
For more information on ImpactAssets’ climate approach, please visit our Climate Solutions page.
LEGAL AND PROGRAM DISCLAIMER: This is not a solicitation to buy or sell securities, nor a private placement offering pursuant to any private placement memorandum that must be issued to qualified investors.