Katie MacDonald, co-founder of Tailwind Climate, discusses the commercial barriers and capital intensity of scaling hardware-intensive water technology solutions.
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…”
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.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
MacDonald: Only 8 of 150 climate VCs actively invest in resilience
“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 wo…”
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 …”
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”
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…”