Assertion Not publicly verifiable AI assessment confidence: 80% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

MacDonald: Only 8 of 150 climate VCs actively invest in resilience

Katie MacDonald · The rise of climate adaptation tech · Sep 5, 2024 · at 14:06

Katie MacDonald, co-founder of Tailwind Climate, discusses investor landscape research on climate adaptation and resilience (A&R) venture funds.

0:00 / 0:37exact quote · 37.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We looked at a 150 different portfolios within the climate tech VC space. So you could say that's like the large majority of the investors out there. And we found that 19 of those 150 climate tech investors were totally resilience curious. Like they had the word resilience or adaptation like all over their websites. But in terms of actual evidence of companies they'd invested in, we couldn't really find anything. And today, like, when we look at, okay, who is absolutely overtly crushing it from a climate tech space perspective, there are only about eight different firms that are, like, meaningfully leaning in on some of these themes”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Katie MacDonald

Prediction Not checkable as stated
MacDonald: DOD climate procurement will rapidly lower civilian adaptation tech costs
“Like, this is a part of the public sector that's going to rapidly lower the cost of stuff that, like, regular civilians need, and that could extend to stuff like, you know, detection of vector-borne illnesses or other illnesses or biometric sensors that detect…”
Katie MacDonald Sep 5, 2024 ▶ 31:35 The rise of climate adaptation tech
Opinion
MacDonald: Adaptation tech market is severely undercounted due to dual-benefit solutions
“I actually think that if you accounted for all of the incidences of these co-benefit-creating technologies, the numbers in terms of technologies we see today as being adaptation and resilience would be far, far higher than we currently know.”
Katie MacDonald Sep 5, 2024 ▶ 7:50 The rise of climate adaptation tech
Assertion Supported
MacDonald: Only 21% of 6,000+ corporates have climate adaptation plans
“S&P Global did this, like, risky business report on the state of corporate action in this space. They looked at, like, well over 6000 corporates, and out of those 6000 corporates or so, only 21% even had adaptation plans, and within those plans, only 50% were …”
Katie MacDonald Sep 5, 2024 ▶ 25:06 The rise of climate adaptation tech
Opinion
MacDonald: Water tech will remain expensive to scale without stronger buyer demand
“Until we see some really strong signals from buyers that they're willing to fund some of these more advanced systems that move beyond IOT and software and really get into, Large kind of economies of scale type water solutions. You know, I think it's going to b…”
Katie MacDonald Sep 5, 2024 ▶ 28:40 The rise of climate adaptation tech
Prediction Not checkable as stated
MacDonald: Investors will likely adopt engineering firms' climate adaptation risk calculations
“There are a lot of different engineering firms like RWDI and Arup and others that are stepping in to, like, provide some of those calculations that I think the broader investment space will probably end up using”
Katie MacDonald Sep 5, 2024 ▶ 33:31 The rise of climate adaptation tech
Insight
MacDonald: The climate adaptation ecosystem needs a Project Drawdown-style framework
“We need to do here, and we're committed to pushing on this at Tailwind, is, like, we need, like, a project drawdown for resilience, or we need, like, we need, like, a speed and scale for resilience. That's what we need, honestly, because we need, like, the obj…”
Katie MacDonald Sep 5, 2024 ▶ 34:33 The rise of climate adaptation tech
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.