Introducing Airys Insights

August 28, 2025

Airys began as a research initiative at Stanford.
In 2023, our team united around a single mission: to reduce the harm that extreme weather inflicts on communities.

Today, searching “resilience” online often leads to 100+ page planning documents and dense climate risk metrics. But our focus is different—we want to make sure actual projects get built, on the ground, to keep people safe.

In simpler terms: fewer subways turning into rivers, and more robust warnings before disaster strikes.

Who We’ve Heard From

After a year of research and 300+ interviews, we’ve learned that many resilience projects stall or disappear entirely due to lack of funding.

300+
expert interviews
6
pilot partner
organizations
9
industry conferences
attended
22
states reached

What We Heard

As we talked to more people, we saw what seemed like just a problem for the government also creeping up into how investors, homeowners, insurers, and others make decisions about serving a community.

Insurance

“A common misconception about insurance I often hear is: I adopted resilience measure X, how much is my premium going to go down? Unfortunately, that's the wrong conversation to be having. The real conversation to be having is, can I still buy insurance?"
- Insurance Carrier

The real benefit of resiliency strategies is more often the ability to maintain access to insurance or to avoid steep price increases, rather than seeing immediate cost savings. Additionally, people often overestimate the ability to finance large-scale resilience projects (like ecological restoration) through projected insurance savings, but financing rarely works based solely on the assumption of future premium reductions.
Municipal Finance

“If you wait for that flood levy to collapse on its own, FEMA will come in and pay you to rebuild it. If you want to proactively rebuild the flood levy, you’re probably going to have to take out a bond for it and pay your own money… It’s cheaper for cities to wait for the flood levy to fail.”
- Municipal Investment Researcher

Municipal bonds finance roughly 70% of America’s public infrastructure (MBFA). Our hypothesis was that resilient infrastructure—whether new development or retrofits—could command a pricing premium in municipal bond markets due to reduced disaster risk. Yet in practice, the impact of climate risk on municipal bond valuation remains largely absent. Shorter bond maturities and the expectation of federal disaster aid blunt the incentive to account for long-term resilience.
Engineering and Construction

“In a post-BRIC world, we’re going state by state. If they have a state resilience office or officer, we’ll pursue further business in that state. If they don’t, that state will be left behind on resilience.”
- Engineering Consultant

With federal data on resilience becoming harder to access, it’s more important than ever for cities to shine a light on their own infrastructure and preparedness efforts. We expected the private sector to already have strong, data-driven systems pushing resilience forward. Instead, most efforts are still broad, state-by-state approaches—far from what’s needed. The reality is that resilience must be built locally, whether or not FEMA programs are there to support it.
Local Government

“The #1 challenge [to resilience] is that they’re not sexy projects. What’s sexy is a new sports center, building new sidewalks, parking lots and parking garages. The utility is immediate and noticeable to the public. [We need to] understand the necessity of non-sexy projects like waterlines and sewerlines.”
- City Chief Financial Officer

While we disagree, resilience isn’t a sexy topic for most. City officials noted that critical infrastructure improvements—such as upgrades to power and water systems—tend to go unnoticed, despite forming the foundation of daily life. The real challenge lies not only in building resilience but in communicating it effectively to the public so that its value is visible and widely understood.
Investors

“Look, you brought me something in New York City that has a couple of pages of climate risk, and you followed the process to include the materials and they show this isn't so bad. And yet, if I look at my Instagram feed, friends who live in New York, they're showing pictures of subway stations that are rivers every couple weeks.”
- Investment Manager

Climate risk is just the entry point. Real resilience—whether in buildings or entire systems—comes only when we go beyond risk scores and understand the underlying data. We expected that highlighting risk alone would push investment decisions. What we’ve learned instead is that progress requires looking closer at how properties, cities, and regions are actively preparing for the future.
Commercial Real Estate

“What's most difficult for CRE is they don’t have an easy way to pull together, to be able to judge if the plans are being put to action.”
- CRE Architect

We expected commercial real estate (CRE) to make smarter decisions simply by reviewing a city’s climate and infrastructure plans. But plans only tell part of the story—and often include fluff or projects that never get implemented. To truly understand the environment they’re investing in, CRE needs to look across a broader set of government documents and evidence of what’s actually happening on the ground.

What's Next

We are launching Airys Insights to highlight how community vulnerability to extreme weather directly impacts real dollar flows. Our goal is to spark cross-sector dialogue and create a platform that puts resilience into the spotlight. 

By working together, we can establish resilience as the foundation for capital access, public trust, and sustainable communities.

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