Excessive climate occasions have gotten extra frequent, intense, and expensive. In 2024 alone, world pure disasters resulted in an estimated $368 billion in financial losses, with 60% of those losses uninsured, highlighting a considerable safety hole (Insurance coverage Enterprise). Wanting forward, a 2024 World Financial Discussion board report predicts that by 2050, climate-intensified pure disasters might result in $12.5 trillion in financial losses worldwide (World Financial Discussion board).
On the identical time, company publicity to local weather dangers is anticipated to triple by mid-century, with over $1.14 trillion in market worth in danger for corporations listed on main world exchanges (Axios).
Nevertheless, there may be additionally an enormous alternative on the horizon. In accordance with a 2025 report by FIC and Bain & Firm, world revenues from local weather adaptation options are anticipated to develop from $1 trillion at present to $4 trillion by 2050, whereas the funding alternative might soar from $2 trillion to $9 trillion (GIC, 2025).
These figures spotlight an investable frontier for the personal sector. It’s a house the place impression enterprise capital can play a catalytic position in accelerating applied sciences that may save lives, defend belongings, and create financial worth.
The Energy of Adaptation & Resilience Applied sciences
Cisco Basis is answering this name by its Regenerative Future Fund and grants to nonprofits. The Basis strategically invests in progressive applied sciences designed to assist communities adapt, reply to, and mitigate the impacts of utmost climate occasions.
The Regenerative Future Fund’s strategy combines affected person, catalytic capital with blended finance fashions, creating an enabling atmosphere for corporations to scale transformative adaptation options, even when fast monetary returns are unsure.
Preserve studying to study extra about 5 startups and organizations the Basis is supporting and the way they’re serving to communities adapt and construct resilience.
Responding to Rainstorms and Hurricanes: Actual-Time Flood Monitoring with Hohonu
The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was one of many costliest on report, inflicting roughly $200 billion in damages, with 20 named storms battering the USA and leading to widespread injury (New York Put up/ Fox Climate). Actual-time water information on the neighborhood stage is vital for life-saving decision-making. With hurricanes intensifying and transferring extra unpredictably, the distinction of some inches in water stage can decide whether or not a neighborhood floods.
For instance, many communities affected by storms like Hurricane Helene in 2024 lacked well timed and localized water stage information, resulting in insufficient early-warnings, delayed responses, and elevated injury.
Hohonu, which supplies sensible monitoring instruments, fills this hole by delivering community-level visibility into altering water circumstances. Their reasonably priced flood-monitoring sensors ship real-time, hyperlocal water stage information to susceptible coastal and inland communities, enabling swifter, extra knowledgeable choices round evacuations, infrastructure safety, and emergency response. The flexibility to trace water ranges on a block-by-block stage can cut back emergency response instances by as much as 30% and has been proven to extend the efficacy of flood preparedness efforts by greater than 40%.
With help from the Cisco Basis Regenerative Future Fund, Hohonu is scaling quickly and dealing with each authorities and business entities to carry real-time water monitoring to each group that wants it. As Kevin Mukai, Hohonu’s COO, famous, “With Cisco Basis’s aim of constructing resilient and empowered communities – to not point out Cisco’s strengths in networking, IoT, and digital transformation – the match couldn’t be higher.”
As of 2025, Hohonu has deployed greater than 160 monitoring stations throughout 16 states, producing hundreds of thousands of hours of publicly out there water stage information. This open-access strategy reinforces the significance of transparency and public engagement in resilient infrastructure and clever monitoring options. By serving to communities construct their very own consciousness and response capabilities, Hohonu’s platform strengthens native autonomy and preparedness within the face of rising climate and environmental dangers. Study extra how Hohonu helps Lee County keep forward of flooding on this video:
Predictive AI Analytics for Wildfire Administration: Vibrant Planet
In 2023 and 2024, the USA skilled a few of its most harmful wildfire seasons in current reminiscence. In accordance with the Nationwide Interagency Fireplace Heart, wildfires burned over 8.5 million acres nationwide in 2024 alone. In California, Los Angeles County noticed a number of wildfires exacerbated by dry circumstances and gas buildup. These fires displaced 1000’s of residents and induced tens of billions in insured losses — a lot of which could have been mitigated with a $9 million funding in fuels reductions alongside the wild-urban interface, in response to publish hearth evaluation on the Eaton Fireplace carried out by Vibrant Planet.
That is precisely the place Vibrant Planet’s platform is available in. It’s a first-of-its-kind choice help system that permits hearth districts, states, counties, federal companies and utilities to grasp present danger and ecological well being, pinpoint priorities for danger mitigation remedies, then simulate the results of various remedies (comparable to defensible house, hazardous fuels discount, forest thinning or prescribed burns) and, over time, quantify ecological and financial advantages. The platform additionally helps cross-jurisdictional coordination of plans and spending for implementation. In Placer County, California, which has the best variety of buildings prone to wildfire in California, native authorities used Vibrant Planet to prioritize and plan 20,000 acres of wildfire danger discount remedies throughout forested communities. The end result was a cohesive, community-supported roadmap that not solely diminished hearth danger but in addition improved water safety, biodiversity, and carbon storage, authorised inside 14 weeks, in comparison with typical multi-year planning processes. Vibrant Planet is now contracted as an annual subscription throughout 73 million acres in eight western states, together with about 30 million acres in California alone.
Vibrant Planet’s expertise reduces the time it takes to develop and approve forest administration plans from years to weeks and reduces battle in advanced socioecological environments. The platform supplies forecasted outcomes of various sorts and intensities of therapy, and fashions their results on wildfire likelihood and depth, which helps managers weigh and talk tradeoffs of various plans to drive public help and funding for implementation. By quite a few partnerships, Vibrant Planet supplies a complete wildfire resilience resolution — from house-level defensible house to wildland-urban interface hazardous fuels reductions, to watershed-scale ecosystem restoration.
Cisco Basis’s funding has supported the growth of those capabilities, enabling broader adoption of Vibrant Planet and accelerating the event of recent options, together with slope stabilization planning and ecosystem restoration help. As hearth danger will increase, platforms like Vibrant Planet will likely be important for constructing long-term resilience and defending individuals, infrastructure, and nature.
Autonomous Wildfire Suppression: Rain
By Azolla Ventures — an impact-first investor supporting early-stage expertise corporations that may obtain large-scale impression—Cisco Basis not directly helps Rain, a startup remodeling wildfire response by autonomous plane. Constructing on the confirmed Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter and MATRIX autonomy platform,
Rain’s AI firefighting pilot permits plane to autonomously understand, perceive, goal, and suppress rising wildfires, lowering response instances and bettering security for human responders. This mix of synthetic intelligence (AI) and autonomous robotics represents a cutting-edge strategy to fireside mitigation/administration, providing communities a fast, dependable instrument to fight wildfires successfully.
The autonomous expertise behind helicopters outfitted with Rain is essential in tackling fires throughout hazardous circumstances, comparable to nighttime or in rugged terrain, when conventional firefighting efforts face important obstacles. This superior functionality can save helpful response time and defend firefighters by lowering their publicity to excessive dangers.
Superior Forest Administration: Earth Drive
Earth Drive is advancing forest administration by remote-controlled equipment and real-time digital monitoring. By modernizing vegetation administration, Earth Drive permits safer and extra environment friendly wildfire prevention at scale. This expertise not solely mitigates wildfire dangers but in addition enhances native financial resilience by creating safer, technology-driven forestry jobs.
Earth Drive’s remote-controlled gear permits for safer and extra exact forest clearing, considerably lowering the hazard to staff in wildfire-prone areas. This modernization addresses labor shortages in forest administration and positions communities to proactively tackle wildfire danger extra successfully.
Cisco Basis Regenerative Future Fund helps Earth Drive by an funding in Third Sphere, an early-stage fund backing AI-native founders remodeling world programs by climate-aligned applied sciences.
Empowering Communities to Construct Resiliency: Open Future Coalition
Open Future Coalition (OFC) works alongside communities to design adaptable workflows, construct capability, and foster ecosystems of apply throughout sectors like regenerative agriculture, watershed restoration, and Indigenous land stewardship.This work has been particularly impactful in Western North Carolina, the place OFC is partnering with North Carolina A&T State College and Warren Wilson School to help flood response efforts, citizen participation in scientific analysis, and regional biocultural mapping as a part of broader post-disaster restoration and resilience methods.
The Regional Resilience Fellowship program—launched with grant help from the Cisco Basis—performed a key position in shaping these instruments by real-world use throughout 35+ challenge websites, laying the groundwork for a “residing library” of community-published assets, templates, and curricula from tasks throughout the OFC community. By strengthening a typical infrastructure for native motion, OFC helps communities from Appalachia to the Amazon scale their impression and mobilize the assets they should construct resilient communities.
Constructing a Extra Resilient Future
Cisco Basis’s Regenerative Future Fund and resiliency-related grants are integral components of the corporate’s broader environmental sustainability technique, the Plan for Attainable, in addition to our long-standing catastrophe response efforts. This begins with worker fundraising campaigns and grants to nonprofits that help communities within the fast aftermath of a catastrophe. It extends to Cisco Disaster Response deployments that use our expertise to help first responders, and to longer-term resilience and restoration efforts with our expertise, our individuals, and our assets.
Study extra about how the Cisco Basis helps resiliency on cisco.com
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