The rise of climate adaptation tech

Mitigation is easy to scope because you follow the emissions. Kann’s version is that decarbonization requires transforming five and a half sectors, the five where emissions come from plus carbon management built from scratch, and anything measurable in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent is in. Adaptation has to be scoped through the opposite lens, by asking where the impacts land. MacDonald describes two detectors: where climate hazards do major harm to human health and physical assets, and where they put large economic value at risk. Running those over the IPCC goals and the Sustainable Development Goals produced Tailwind’s taxonomy of eight themes with 35 sectors underneath, released earlier that year with support from ClimateWorks.

The interesting failure mode is the opposite of the one you would expect. Kann’s worry is not that nothing qualifies but that everything does, and MacDonald’s answer widens the category rather than narrowing it. Energy storage, microgrids, residential solar, wildfire prevention and soil carbon all lower emissions while making someone more resilient, and she argues that if you counted every co-benefit the adaptation numbers would be far higher than anyone currently records. Asked directly what a person might call adaptation that she would rule out, she does not name a category; she says the public’s default answer is public infrastructure such as seawalls, and that the taxonomy is her best cut at a worldview rather than a fence. So the boundary ends up functional rather than exclusive, and the practical limit on who invests turns out to be expertise instead. A generalist or health-focused fund may find it easier to become an adaptation investor in health than a climate investor will, while hardening a hospital’s physical plant, upgrading its air filtration and islanding its power, is squarely climate-tech work. Kann calls himself an accidental adaptation investor, and MacDonald’s survey of 150 climate tech portfolios found 19 firms using resilience language with no investments she could find behind it, and only about eight leaning in meaningfully.

The objection that does the real work is timing. Venture capital needs an inflection inside a few years; climate impacts arrive over decades; corporate planning horizons are short; and because feedback loops are long you cannot tell whether a risk model was right, which makes trust hard to build. MacDonald agrees rather than rebutting, and her own evidence sharpens the point: of the 6,000-plus companies in an S&P Global study, 21% had adaptation plans at all, and half of those planned nothing inside ten years. Her answer is to split the market. One bucket is already burning, and what lit it is the insurance crisis rather than climate risk in the abstract, which is why climate risk and intelligence analytics is where venture-scale adoption sits today. The rest is what she calls a rolling boil: corporates and governments showing early signs of becoming buyers of hard technology, pushed along by disclosure rules such as California’s SB 261, which takes effect in 2026 and forces companies first to understand their exposure and then to do something about it.

What is missing is the scoreboard. MacDonald splits measurement into value at risk, which is hard but genuinely quantifiable for economic assets and is already being calculated by engineering firms, and adaptive capacity, which is squishy. She borrows a continuum from the UN Environment Programme running from absorptive capacity, meaning coping at all, through adaptive capacity, meaning genuine adjustment, to transformative capacity, meaning structural change that raises resilience on an ongoing basis. Her judgment on the field’s progress is blunt: it has done a very bad job to date, and what it needs is the equivalent of Project Drawdown or Speed and Scale for resilience, a set of objectives and key results the whole ecosystem can point at. Kann’s closing agreement supplies the stakes. Without that definition the category floats out into the ether and never becomes its own thing, which matters precisely because the thesis on offer is that with proper definition this is an attractive place to put money.