It’s widely known that simple measures taken before climate fueled disasters can prevent human suffering and save enormously on the cost of rebuilding. But human nature is that people procrastinate—sometimes until it’s too late. Another problem is cost. Even if making buildings or infrastructure resilient saves money in the long term, it can be expensive in the near term.

Gina Hardy is the CEO of two state-chartered nonprofit insurance companies in North Carolina. Combined, they insure hundreds of billions of dollars in property owned by more than half a million policyholders. Her companies—like many others—use catastrophe bonds, or cat bonds, to spread the risk of its insurance policies to the broader financial markets. But in the case of the companies Gina leads, the cat bonds can also make available funds that ultimately allow the payment of up to $10,000 each to insured homeowners if they install a roof specially reinforced to withstand the strong storms and high winds that increasingly threaten houses in North Carolina.

I sat down with Gina to understand how an innovatively-structured catastrophe bond could allow an insurance company to pay so much for resilience without a government subsidy. I wanted to learn how financial provisions in bond transactions in the hundreds of millions of dollars could pay to strengthen homes of individual families. And I wanted to know what Gina and her colleagues learned about the practical challenges of designing and implementing a first of its kind program like this one.

Resources referenced in this episode:

• NCIUA (Coastal Property Insurance Pool) and NCJUA (FAIR Plan)
• Insurance Institute for Building & Home Safety
• University of Alabama Center for Risk and Insurance Research

Wars and national defense cause enormous greenhouse gas emissions. But military-related climate pollution is generally excluded from climate change emission totals, including those reported under the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).

Obviously, the Trump administration has been pushing US allies to shoulder more of their own security. And many European nations have already been ramping up military spending at least since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But at the same time, the US has also continued to increase its own military spending. And so have other nations around the world, from Russia and China to Pakistan, Mexico, Japan, and others.

My guest today is Ellie Kinney. She’s the Senior Climate Advocacy Officer at a UK-based NGO called the Conflict and Environment Observatory. She and her colleagues advocate for the inclusion of military emissions in national accounting for greenhouse gas pollution. They estimate that the climate costs of military activities is above 5.5% of annual global emissions. That’s nearly half the amount produced by all the world’s cars, and more than all the emissions from aviation.

I sat down with Ellie to learn why military emissions data is so hard to come by. I wanted to know what can be done to improve transparency and how the climate impact of militaries might be reduced. I wanted to better understand what strategies and innovations the Conflict and Environment Observatory and allied organizations are using in their efforts to highlight and alleviate this enormous, growing, and mostly hidden problem.

Additional resources mentioned in this episode:

• The Conflict and Environment Observatory
• https://militaryemissions.org/
• Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War
• Benjamin Neimark and Kate Mackintosh: "How wars ravage the environment – and what international law is doing about it"
• Bellingcat

Catastrophe bonds, or cat bonds, have exploded in popularity in recent years. They have emerged as a critical financial tool to foster resilience from hurricanes and other disasters that are made worse or more frequent by climate change. By the end of 2025, more than $60 billion in cat bonds were outstanding.

The world’s leading firm in structuring cat bond transactions is Aon Securities. My guest today is its CEO, Richard Pennay. Over more than two decades, he has helped to pioneer development of this innovative financial instrument.

I sat down with Richard to learn more about how these deals work and what they’re used for. I wanted to better understand their unique role in resilience. And I was curious to know how their use may expand as the effects of climate change worsen, and as states and localities may need to shoulder more of the cost of their own recovery from disasters.