Resources

• Resilience bonds allow governments to finance projects by creating a value stream from costs avoided by enacting the projects—such as from insurance savings generated when constructing a seawall would prevent millions of dollars in storm damages. Those projected savings are captured in the financing that funds the construction of the sea wall.
• Learn more about Re:Focus Partners and its resources including The Toolkit for Procuring Resilience and A Guide for Public-Sector Resilience Bond Sponsorship.

Guests

Host: Rebekah Emanuel, Head of Social Entrepreneurship, Harvard Innovation Labs

Guests: Shalini Vajjhala, Founder & CEO, re:focus partners; Jamie Rhodes, Director Insurance-Linked Finance, re:focus partners

Transcript

Shalini Vajjhala:
So, if you think about major hurricanes that hit an area that would have normally not all gotten hit at once, so the entire Gulf Coast doesn't get slammed at once, usually. But now with climate change, we're seeing more intense and more frequent storms, and so you'll have more correlated claims that put insurance portfolios at risk.

Rebekah Emanuel:
I'm Rebekah Emanuel. This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School. We explore the business implications and opportunities of climate change. In this season of Climate Rising, we focus on entrepreneurship tackling climate change. I'm the Director of Social Entrepreneurship at Harvard Innovation Labs. I work with current and future entrepreneurs every day.

Innovating to address climate change isn't just about launching technologies to replace fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It's also about creating business tools that help communities adapt to the ever increasing impacts of climate change. They're already a fact of life. Paying for protections for our cities and towns is notoriously difficult, especially when the threat hasn't hit yet, and can be really hard to find the money. In today's episode we explore new thinking on how we design and finance the infrastructure projects needed to protect our homes and workplaces from the physical side of climate change, things like more intense storms, sea level rise, droughts and wildfires.

Our guests today are from Refocus Partners. They run a firm that works to design and finance infrastructure solutions, Shalini Vajjhala founded Refocus, and Jamie Rhodes is the Director of Insurance Linked Finance. Shalini and Jamie tell us how they're using new design and financial structures to do what sometimes seems impossible, helping communities finance large scale climate resiliency projects. We'll talk about resilience bonds, which allows cities to finance projects by capturing value from costs they avoid. This is like creating a revenue stream from these avoided costs. For example, a seawall built to prevent millions of dollars in storm damages also generates insurance savings, and those projected savings are captured in the financing that allows the funding of the construction of the seawall. It's a novel approach. Shalini, Jamie, thanks for being here.

Shalini Vajjhala:
Thanks, Rebekah. Great to be here.

Jamie Rhodes:
Yeah. Thank you very much.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Shalini, maybe we can start with how the company got its start. I heard the work you're doing today at Refocus grew out of a long-standing friendship the two of you had, and that maybe there was a moment when you were deep in conversation that burst this whole idea. Can you tell me about that?

Shalini Vajjhala:
So Refocus is now going on eight years old. And over the last eight years, we have become a really interesting small shop for tackling resilience problems and developing solutions that live at the intersection of design and finance. And so I'm an architect and engineer by training, and our whole team has experience working at all levels of government, federal, state, and local, and with international agencies. And we all function like troubleshooters around big problems that are ill-defined, but where a solution really matters at the community level and to the government agencies that are affected by these problems.

And so, about three years in to Refocus' operations, we had been designing major infrastructure projects and working on things like flood mitigations in places like Hoboken that were under 12 feet of water after hurricane Sandy, to coastal protection finance in Miami Beach, flash flooding in El Paso. So really problems that ran the gamut. And we realized we were designing actual, buildable infrastructure projects that were creating insurance benefits. So you reduce the risk, and you should, in theory, see insurance prices go down, insurance premiums. And what we were getting back instead was, well that's lovely that you're doing this. If you talk to a retail insurance company, they'll say that your rates won't go up as fast, and that just didn't sit right with us.

And so Jamie is one of my go-to friends and colleagues. We've always been sounding boards for each other since we went to grad school together at Carnegie Mellon. And so I reached out to Jamie and said, "this doesn't feel right. Can I borrow your brain?" We sat down and realized that there was an enormous opportunity to step back from traditional insurance to think about reinsurance where costs are passed through if we fail to protect ourselves from major natural disasters, for example, and that we could actually think about insurance and an infrastructure like energy efficiency, where you create a savings that is capturable and can be used to pay back the project. And so that was the genesis of our resilience finance work in the insurance space.

Rebekah Emanuel:
You got your start in resiliency back when you were working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA. Back then you were working with cities to help them deal with storm water problems, which we only expect to grow more frequent and intense with climate change. Can you talk about your work back then and how it applies to today's efforts to make cities more resilient?

Shalini Vajjhala:
Well, so I started at EPA in 2009, and that was right around the time where a lot of cities were trying to wrap their heads around the problem of citywide green infrastructure. And this is specifically green infrastructure for storm water. So if you think about what this challenge looks like in practice, we typically have a set of large pipes under streets, big water treatment plants. And when heavy rain comes through in different cities, that water gets swooped up through the funnel, treated in the water treatment plant if all goes well, and then pushed back out into the ecosystems around the community.

And from EPA's perspective, we want to make sure that that water coming out the other side is clean. When you have major storms and cities can't handle that capacity, what you're dealing with is an enormous strain on urban water systems for managing storm water, and the funnel isn't big enough to catch all the water to carry it through and make sure it's treated. So, in some cases you have water rushing straight off the streets into, where we are here in San Diego, directly into the Pacific Ocean. In places like Hoboken, it goes right off into the Hudson River.

Rebekah Emanuel:
And what's the problem with that?

Shalini Vajjhala:
The problem with that is it takes everything with it. So if you think about draining water across the city, you're picking up all sorts of pollution along the way, and that's not great for water systems or for people who are dealing with that in their backyards. And so what a green infrastructure solution looks like is replacing that system of gray pipes, tunnels, treatment plants with greener alternatives. So think roads that absorb water, so it goes directly into the ground rather than running off the street and taking motor oil with it, for example.

And so you can think about street trees, porous pavements, things that function in nature a lot more like sponges. So instead of a large funnel, you would have a large sponge. But turning a city from a funnel into a sponge is actually a really complex financing problem, because you're essentially taking a few large pieces and parts that we know how much they cost, we know what performance they guarantee, and we know how long it takes to build with them. So we have a lot of confidence around what we already know and the sponge was relatively new.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So in other words, cities have two choices to handle storm water. The first they can invest in storm water capacity. And the second is you could invest in absorption. These are sort of substitutes. The more absorption you invest in, the less storm water capacity you need.

Shalini Vajjhala:
We were seeing a lot of communities that were really doing amazing work to try to tackle this challenge, but they were building the pieces and parts that were easiest to build, not necessarily the ones that delivered the greatest environmental benefits or community benefits for the people served. And so that was really the genesis of how we thought about financing as part of an environmental design problem in my office at EPA. And we started looking at ways that we could tap unusual colors of money or think about using savings to pay for projects where success is something that doesn't happen. A storm hits, but a community isn't flooded.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Normally you don't save money when that happens.

Shalini Vajjhala:
Exactly.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Or you save money relative to what you would have spent, but no one has new money in their bank account.

Shalini Vajjhala:
Exactly right. It looks a lot like energy efficiency. You didn't use something. And so in the spaces where we live and working on things like water at EPA, the challenge is, everybody's paying different amounts for different things, and it takes a lot more effort to figure out that value based financing approach to resilience. And so that's where Refocus really got its start, was from that work at EPA, recognizing that we need different ways of solving these problems if we're talking about greener, distributed, more sustainable infrastructure systems, and we're not just trying to build a better water treatment plant.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So what you're doing is you're thinking unconventionally about the right solution, and then you're creating financial tools that reward preventing disasters. And what you're telling me is this new thinking actually lets cities raise the money to tackle those big projects that reduce the risks from climate change. Can you tell me why resilience bonds are particularly relevant for climate change?

Shalini Vajjhala:
Resilience bonds are an insurance instrument, the way that we conceived of them. And we started this work back in around 2015, because we realized that one of the big challenges around investing in resilience, and as we define resilience, that is measurably reducing risk for communities. It can be risk of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, you name it, anything that would keep a local government official awake at night. And investing in those types of projects, it's success is something that doesn't happen. And if you think about this, this is exactly the space where insurance is most important. You never want to use your life insurance. That means something terrible has happened. And the same is true of health insurance in the best cases, you want to use it only for the things you need it most, you don't want to lean on it. You want to have it for the most unmanageable things. And so, part of what we realized in developing resilience bonds was that we needed a way to capture value of the avoided losses and create a virtuous cycle of re-investing that so that you reduce risks over time.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So you're not just getting the money that no one was going to give you, you're actually getting it and using it for prevention in sort of a cyclic way.

Shalini Vajjhala:
Exactly right. If you think about this in a health insurance analogy, it's health insurers do this already. If you quit smoking, your rates go down. If you go to a gym, it's a little bit tougher to figure out how much. So we know that some things are very, very important for reducing risk, and we're very good at measuring them, and valuing them, and understanding who benefits from that change in behavior. Same thing in the infrastructure space. We understand a lot of different types of coastal protections. We've operated ports for hundreds of years. And so we've now been developing these insurance linked finance solutions, starting with resilience bonds, off that very simple premise that in order to solve the climate adaptation and resilience side of the problem, we need to be able to capture value for these successes that are things that don't happen. And so that was really the genesis of it. Jamie, please chime in here.

Jamie Rhodes:
Sure. Thank you. I mean, I think that you covered a lot of the big points about why resilience bonds lend themselves to the kinds of risks that we see with climate change. I think just a few points that I might add, one is the nature of the risks that are associated with climate change, I think lend themselves well to this type of approach. When we think about climate risks, we're often thinking about catastrophic risks. We're talking about hurricane risk and storm surge getting to the point that it's inundating communities, or we're talking about wildfires at a scale that we've never seen before as we're seeing here on the West Coast.

So I think one is the scale of the risks that we're talking about lends itself well, and in this case specifically to resilience bonds, which as Shalini mentioned, are really designed at the reinsurance level. They're not structures that operate at the household level, but are more amenable to something that's dealing with risk at a community scale. And so when we think about the types of risks that we're dealing with with climate change, we're seeing whole communities that are increasingly vulnerable to very large scale catastrophic risks. And this is the kind of risk that insurance lends itself with to very naturally. And at the same time, the scale and the scope is something that traditional insurance really struggles to try and address.

And so resilience bonds, as Shalini mentioned, resilience bonds are sort of one of a portfolio of tools that we have for linking insurance savings to project finance, but they lend themselves well to the types of risks we see with climate change because of the scale of the risk, the intensity of the risk, but also the scale of the solutions. I mean, if you're talking about trying to protect a whole community, that's a very different type of solution then let's say putting a better roof on your house. And so when we look at the scale of the solutions, we need something that really aggregates the benefits. And that's something that resilience bonds in the reinsurance markets have the capacity to do in a way that very few other parts of the market can really address.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So is it sort of fair to say that you figured out a way to create cash flows based off the knowledge that we have more and bigger catastrophes that are going to happen because of climate change?

Jamie Rhodes:
I think that what we've figured out how to translate risk reductions, physical risk reductions, like a stronger roof on your home or a sea wall, into a cash flow that looks more like a toll road. And so we know how to finance a toll road based on those cash flows that are very predictable. And so now we have a means of financing risk reductions, physical risk reductions using the same kinds of financial instruments that we would use to finance a toll road.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Can you walk me through this? Let's say a city is trying to put in place a project and fund it with a resilience bond, how would that work?

Jamie Rhodes:
Sure. I think there's a number of different threads that all need to come together. One of those threads is the solution itself, the project. Understanding what that project is, and when you're talking about municipal scale infrastructure, you're usually talking about a decade long timeline of planning and development.

Rebekah Emanuel:
That's a long time.

Jamie Rhodes:
Yeah. And so, there's sort of that thread of the project development. And I think the important part that resilience bonds or insurance link finance brings to that thread, the important piece that's often missing is being able to, first of all, provide a cash flow stream to help with the project finance. But I think separately from that is really helping quantify and understand what are the benefits in a way that's not abstract, but is very concrete and tied to hard cash flows. And saying, look, here is the financial value of raising that seawall one foot versus two feet. And we can look at what the marginal benefit is, not in terms of an abstract community benefit, but in terms of a cash flow stream that's going to be beneficial for financing the project.

And so it allows us to take a more traditional project finance approach and apply it to these benefits of a project, the physical protection in order to inform the design of that solution in a way that we really haven't been able to do before. So that, for example, with a seawall, when you go into a public meeting and you're talking about the height of the seawall, you're talking about more than just the impacts on somebody's view. We're able to say, look, here's the extra financial value of that protection, and this is what it's going to mean for your insurance and for your home. And let's understand that and talk about that in more concrete terms then talking about, say a 200 year storm event, which is a very abstract concept for folks.

Shalini Vajjhala:
The work that we're doing on resilience bonds, Rebekah, is just the tip of the spear for a whole portfolio of work, where any of this kind of value capture is important for actually making sure a project goes forward. And in the case of the $2 savings on your toll road, the way that we think about this is you're not just saving $2, you're also helping cap how much costs go up. Because with climate change, you're not talking about a static insurance cost, or a static value of protection. We're seeing things get worse and that will cost more. So you're trying to press down that increase and also capture the savings. And sometimes the certainty around knowing that your costs won't go up dramatically is worth an enormous amount for a transit system or a water utility that's looking at really trying to manage very large assets with things like heat, that disrupt transit systems. So it's not just about the savings. It's also about making sure that you aren't facing continuously rising and unaffordable costs.

Jamie Rhodes:
I think in addition, I mean, if you think about the different pieces of this and the benefits, one is about the savings. Two is about protecting against future cost increases. Three, like I was saying about the setting of the seawall height or discussing the seawall height and being able to quantify the incremental benefits, there's an element of this that really supports the integrity of the project design to deliver more meaningful benefits to the community. And the last one is that when you recognize that you're paying that $10 every year, and there's $2 of savings that you could realize as soon as the project is done, it creates a sense of urgency and to actually get the project across the finish line.

Rebekah Emanuel:
It started off, Shalini, with you turning to traditional insurance, retail insurance, and saying, hey, can you help with this? And they sort of said, well, just the rates won't go up as fast. And you said that doesn't really make sense. And then the two of you together turn toward reinsurers, and that's part of what made this all possible. Can you tell me why was that a key move? What changed?

Jamie Rhodes:
I think there's some structural differences with respect to insurance and reinsurance that really make a tremendous amount of difference when you're looking at this type of approach. And one of them is a structural aspect of the retail insurance markets, which is that every year a retail insurance company is competing for the next year's policy. They are only in business if they can win the business and earn those premiums. And when you're in that competitive environment, the regulators of that market want to ensure that that's a fair, and free, and competitive market. And so what we have is a situation where if I'm a retail insurance company and I want to support a community scale protection that takes 30 years to amortize, I'm going to bear those costs upfront and have to pay them off through my premiums over the future years.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Not a winning proposition.

Jamie Rhodes:
Not a winning proposition. So I'm going to make that investment upfront, I'm going to have that additional cost on my cash flows, and I'm not going to be able to compete effectively to win the next year's business. And so there's a feature of the insurance markets that is there for very good reasons, but that makes it very difficult to capture insurance savings on a forward-looking basis that's outside of a single policy year. And so the reinsurance markets allow us to aggregate up to a larger scale on the one hand. So you've got fewer policies and fewer policy holders because they're all aggregated at very large scale. But more importantly, you're able to aggregate across policy years in a way that you can't really do effectively at the retail level for very good reasons.

Shalini Vajjhala:
I think there's another piece to this also, Rebekah, that's really interesting, which is that reinsurers tend to have a more macro view of long-term risks. So reinsures insure insurers. So when you see major widespread events, like the wildfires that we're having here on the West Coast, you will see insurance companies that go out of business, because they have so many claims in the same policy year-

Rebekah Emanuel:
And it all hit at once.

Shalini Vajjhala:
That all hit at once.

Rebekah Emanuel:
They sort of banked on that not happening.

Shalini Vajjhala:
And that happens when, so if you think about major hurricanes that hit an area that would have normally not all gotten hit at once, so the entire Gulf Coast doesn't get slammed at once, usually. But now with climate change, we're seeing more intense and more frequent storms. And so you'll have more correlated claims that put insurance portfolios at risk.

Rebekah Emanuel:
That's exactly the opposite of what an insurance company is calculating on happening.

Shalini Vajjhala:
Exactly right. And so they buy protection for themselves. So the insurance company is buying reinsurance. And the reinsurers are much more, they have a wider angle view on these challenges, and also have a greater influence, I think, on how physical protection aligns with financial protection. So the insurance industry really early on was one of the big drivers for urban fire protection measures, early fire departments were funded by insurance companies. And if you had insurance, then your fire would get put out.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So the question is, what is it about climate change that gives reinsurers an incentive to be innovating?

Shalini Vajjhala:
Fire is very clear in a lot of ways, and urban fire was especially, because the measures were well understood on what you could do to prevent, and protect, and reduce the risk. And now as we get into territory where climate change is essentially a threat multiplier, it's making many things worse along many dimensions, and there's a lot more uncertainty around the types of things that you can do to reduce the risk. We're in territory where we have to be really smart about the methods that let us essentially value physical risk reductions, and then quickly align them with the types of financial protection that you want.

You would never want to exclusively give up your financial protection for physical protection. That is exactly why we have both life and health insurance. You would never want to substitute your life insurance for your health insurance. And so, we see these things as fundamentally linked, the same way that early on and how Refocus started, we realized that finance is part of the design process. In this case, we see physical and financial protection as being inherently linked. And the reinsurance level of the insurance industry is best able to see that and to act on it, and drive large scale change as opposed to sending notices to individual policy holders, for example.

Rebekah Emanuel:
It sounds like part of Refocus' expertise is to bring this kind of design mindset towards these types of challenges. Can you tell me some of the ideas that have come out from having a design framework that grounds you? Maybe tell me about Hoboken and that bathtub idea?

Shalini Vajjhala:
We started working with Hoboken just after Hurricane Sandy in 2013. They're a perfect example of where design thinking really lets you shift the frame of the problem to come up with more interesting and viable solutions. So Hoboken, for folks who haven't been there, is a city that is almost exactly one square mile across the river from New York City. And it is almost entirely paved and shaped like a bowl. So you can picture how in a perfect storm, like Hurricane Sandy, the city just collected water and it stayed there. And some folks were out of power for a couple of weeks, trapped in upper story apartments. And so this was really a horrible situation. So when we started working with Hoboken out of a competition that we designed, we asked them what their problem was and they said flooding. And we asked what their problem was again, and they said more flooding.

And so it took us a few different design thinking, framed conversations to say, okay, we understand this is the most pressing problem. Picture your city 20 years from now, what do you wish you had? And what do you wish wouldn't happen? And so they said, well, we also don't have a lot of green space. We don't have parks for kids. We don't have recreational spaces for seniors. And we really struggle with parking. There are a lot of folks who commute from Hoboken to New York by train, so there are cars that just live on streets for a large part of a day or a week. And the city had just woken up to the fact that these cars were, the vast majority of them were completely flooded out and unrecoverable after Sandy. We think about assets like buildings flooding, but also vehicles are major losses during storms.

And so, what we realized is that we could actually combine all three of these things for the city and do something really interesting, where parking fees could help pay for flood protection. And this goes to almost everything that Jamie and I have described about the challenge of financing resilience, which is flood protection creates a future benefit or an avoided loss, the success that didn't happen. But parking is a here and now benefit. That is your toll road. You put your car somewhere, you pay a fee for it. You're happy, the car is safe, and there's a fee to collect. And so, what we did is we took this approach of reframing the challenge away from flood protection to saying, how can we meet the city's top priorities through an integrated design solution that also uses easy to pay for things to help finance the hard to pay for things?

And so that was the origin of the project that got the early nickname of the bathtub, because what we came up with for the city was a plan for a six acre site that had just been an albatross for the city. It was a deeply contaminated former industrial site that was chain linked fenced off. And the city was in the process of acquiring it and acquiring the land. And they knew it would take a couple of years to clean up the contamination, but they really wanted it to be part of a forward set of resilience investments. And so we helped them design the solution. Because of the linkage between two different sectors, essentially two different departments in the city, flooding with the utility and parking, and the municipal parking department, we were able to put together something much larger than the city would have thought to tackle as a project on its own.

And so what this allowed us to do is basically bring a SWAT team of engineers, lawyers, and finance experts to say, here's how a community, that if it had looked in its wallet and said what we could have afforded, would have said, well, we can buy a $5 million water pump to deal with flooding. We were able to help them attract their first 30 million in investment to buy land, do site cleanup, and kick start the design process for a now $90 million project that's under construction and going to be completed in 2022. And it's beautiful.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So by looking at unusual sources of revenue, in this case, the parking facility, you're able to significantly increase the size and the scope of the project. And in this case, it wasn't actually a resilience bond that did the financing, but it reflects your role in the design phase to envision a project that satisfies multiple purposes and achieves that climate risk mitigation.

Shalini Vajjhala:
So we helped do the early pre-development for that. And that phase is where Refocus lives in the design thinking space, which is pre RFP, before what your problem even is, but you know you have one. That's where we do our favorite work, because it really lets us come up with innovative solutions. So often, and I know you know this from Boston, if you're forced to write a request for proposals, it means you've already set the shape of the solution, which limits how creative you can get. And then you're just kind of trying to pick among the best of what you've already decided. This type of early intervention lets you come up with things that you might not have done otherwise.

And in this case, Hoboken just last year was awarded money from FEMA for what's called pre-disaster mitigation for this project. And it really sets a template for how communities can think differently about this work. But it takes a lot of upfront time and investment, like any good design process does. And that's why we bring in financing so early, because otherwise you end up with drawings that sit in a flat file without a path to implementation.

Rebekah Emanuel:
So can you tell me why you call it the bathtub and what it looks like?

Shalini Vajjhala:
The early versions of this project or what generated the nickname, the bathtub, we originally had designed the project and said, well, why don't we actually do an underground parking garage? You're going to have to take away contaminated soil anyway, you're digging out a site. Why don't we create a parking garage with pumps at the bottom that basically fills up like a bathtub? And that way you're holding millions of gallons of water that don't flood the surrounding areas. So you're delaying how much water they have to treat and process so their systems don't get overruled.

Rebekah Emanuel:
What did that idea evolve into?

Shalini Vajjhala:
What we did is we said, we can put a park on top of this parking structure. And so you get this layer cake of storm water capture and storage, and green infrastructure, the sponge on top, and recreational space for the community. So you've ticked all the boxes that the community was looking for.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Can you tell me what impact you hope Refocus can ultimately have on climate change? What are you hoping the climate change legacy will be of the work you're doing?

Shalini Vajjhala:
Oh, it's a super simple answer for me. I mean, I hope our legacy is shovels in the ground and money moved to vulnerable communities so that they are safer and better off than the status quo. Protecting humans, ecosystems. I think that we've lost a decade on effective climate resilience investment because there was such competition between reducing emissions or mitigating climate change and adapting to it. And I think 2020, if anything, is just such a reveal of a year in terms of how badly the status quo is broken in so many ways, and we shouldn't want to go back. It wasn't great. So I very much hope that Refocus over the next decade is that catalyst for how we can be really mindful about where we can do more and better rather than just looking for the incremental improvement.

Rebekah Emanuel:
Nice. Tell me yours, Jamie.

Jamie Rhodes:
So I think mine is quite similar in the sense of, I hope the legacy is more shovels in the ground, more steel in the ground, more communities protected, more green infrastructure in the ground, more communities protected, and more efficient, and direct, and faster adaptation to climate change. I think that when you step back and think about it relative to mitigation, there's a broad consensus on what's required to mobilize capital to reduce emissions. You need a carbon price. There's lots of ways to get to a carbon price, but you need a carbon price. And I think the challenge and adaptation is, there isn't a simple carbon price. Each of these challenges, each of these communities is facing different risks, and there's not a one size fits all carbon price that's going to help everybody align incentives. But I believe and I'm hopeful that the approaches that we've been developing at Refocus grow and blossom into a whole set of tools that allow us to do the equivalent of putting a carbon price on emissions, to put a financial value on the protection of vulnerable communities that allows those communities to protect themselves

Rebekah Emanuel:
What a wonderful way to conclude. Shalini, Jamie, thank you.

Shalini Vajjhala:
Thank you.

Jamie Rhodes:
Thank you.

Rebekah Emanuel:
That's it for this episode of Climate Rising. Next time, we'll take a look at new business models and financing that are revitalizing the potential of some of the tried and true technologies that can make a difference for climate change.

This episode was made possible by the remarkable collaboration between this episode's associate producer, Anna Sakalariatis, HBS class of 2020, producer Mary Dooe and our team from the HBS Business and Environment Initiative. That's faculty chair, Mike Toffel and Jennifer Nash, Lynn Schenk and Elise Clarkson. Thanks for joining us. I'm your host, Rebekah Emanuel. This is Climate Rising, a podcast produced by the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We love reviews. You can also find show notes, links to resources discussed on this episode on the Climate rising homepage. That's climaterising.hbs.edu.