During Climate Week NYC 2025, Equal Ventures hosted the Climate Capital Summit, bringing together investors, policymakers, academics, and climate innovators to explore how capital can accelerate the energy transition while managing growing climate risks.

Discussions spanned batteries and fusion breakthroughs, the demands of AI infrastructure, and the rising importance of climate disclosure and insurance markets. A clear theme emerged: climate risk and resilience are now central to how assets are valued, financed, and protected.  

Private markets: separating hype from value

Bloomberg’s Vandana Gombar and Emmanuel Lagarrigue, Global Co-Head of Climate at KKR, opened the summit with a focus on how private markets distinguish hype from scalable solutions.

Lagarrigue described batteries as the “new solar”, a cornerstone for storing renewable energy at scale. He also warned that building out AI infrastructure could consume as much as 5% of US GDP, creating unprecedented strain on electricity systems. For investors, the challenge lies in balancing enthusiasm for breakthrough technologies with realism about the capital and infrastructure required to deliver them.

From our vantage point: investors are also asking how physical climate risks, floods, heat stress, wind variability, affect the long-term resilience of these technologies. That is why asset-level climate assessments are becoming part of due diligence, ensuring innovation is backed by infrastructure that can withstand future conditions.

Academia: turning research into action

A panel of Yale experts, including Dan Esty, Anthony Leiserowitz, Stuart DeCew, Todd Cort, and Eli Fenichel, discussed how academic research informs climate policy and markets.

Survey data showed that 82% of Americans believe insurance costs are rising due to extreme weather, but only half connect this to climate change. The panel argued that global issues must be framed in local and personal terms, for example, the health impacts of air pollution on children with asthma.

They also stressed the need to assign value to ecosystem services, a shift that could reshape asset pricing and investor decision-making.

At Mitiga Solutions, translating science into business decisions is not theoretical. One of our clients, Arjun Infrastructure Partners, used EarthScan to identify flooding risk to a grid asset supplying over 55,000 homes in East London. The insights guided targeted adaptation measures that safeguarded operations and protected communities. This case illustrates why climate intelligence matters: it converts research into tangible resilience and measurable returns.

Energy transition and reliability

Former FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee called for pragmatism in the energy transition.

“The Left needs to see oil and gas as part of the solution. The Right needs to recognise we need solar,” he said.

With AI driving unprecedented electricity demand, Chatterjee argued that the US must rally around reliable and affordable energy from all sources to remain competitive. His message reflected a summit-wide theme: energy policy is no longer only about decarbonisation but also about ensuring the resilience of systems that underpin economic growth.

At Mitiga Solutions, we believe meeting demand requires more than new generation capacity. It means understanding how climate hazards, from heat stress on transmission lines to flooding at substations, will impact infrastructure over time. Forward-looking assessments help energy companies and grid operators direct investment where resilience is most critical.

Real estate and the grid

A panel moderated by Sophia Dodd of Equal Ventures brought together leaders from Prologis, Equinix, Galvanize, and NTT Data to explore how property development intersects with grid constraints.

The speakers agreed: capital planning and resilience planning can no longer be separated. As demand rises and extreme weather intensifies, projects that fail to account for grid reliability and climate exposure risk losing long-term value.

For real estate and infrastructure investors, this is where climate intelligence is increasingly applied. By modelling how hazards such as flooding, extreme heat, or wind stress will affect individual sites over 5-, 10-, or 50-year horizons, investors can make more confident decisions on acquisitions, developments, and retrofits.

Innovations on resilience

Peter Bakker, CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and Greg Steele, Chief Growth Officer at Arcadis, explored how organisations can adapt to intensifying physical climate risks.

Both argued that resilience cannot be achieved in silos. Scalable solutions require cross-sector collaboration between governments, investors, insurers, and corporates. From resilient infrastructure design to nature-based solutions, resilience was framed as a prerequisite for protecting long-term value.

This mirrors what we see across sectors: physical risk has become a driver of capital allocation, insurance structuring, and adaptation planning. Asset-level modelling helps organisations prioritise which facilities or portfolios face the greatest near-term exposure and plan resilience investments accordingly.

Financing the future

Meghan Sharp, Global Head and CIO of Decarbonization Partners at BlackRock, discussed how global investors can accelerate the flow of trillions into decarbonisation, technology scale-up, and risk management. The consensus: capital must move faster to match the scale of climate impacts and opportunities.

Investors are under pressure to distinguish between short-term trends and durable value, and to back projects that can withstand both physical climate risks and market shifts.

Forward-looking climate intelligence is becoming central to this. Stress-testing portfolios under multiple warming scenarios, quantifying potential financial losses, and aligning with frameworks such as IFRS S2, CSRD, and SB 261 helps investors deploy capital with both speed and confidence.

Mitiga Solutions at the Climate Capital summit

In our session at the Climate Capital Summit, we shared how organisations are embedding climate intelligence directly into investment and risk decisions.

Three ways organisations are acting on physical climate risk

1. Understand risk at the asset level. Generic climate risk assessments no longer cut it. Investors need models that capture the specificities of different assets, such as wind turbines or solar farms. That means using damage curves that translate climate hazards into operational and financial impacts over 5-, 10-, 20-, and 50-year horizons.

2. Manage it through adaptation. One participant described investing $100 million to flood-proof grid infrastructure, not because disclosure required it, but because resilience protects long-term value.

3. Protect it with smarter insurance. Forward-looking risk assessments are helping companies structure insurance that rewards resilience, rather than pricing premiums only on baseline exposure.

A $10B portfolio case study

We shared an example of one client who put these principles into practice across a $10B portfolio:

• Conducted asset-level risk assessments under multiple time horizons

• Cut due diligence costs by over $11,000 per asset

• Reduced turnaround time from weeks to hours

• Strengthened TCFD disclosures with forward-looking and site-specific insights

This case shows what becomes possible when climate risk is treated as a decision-driver rather than a compliance exercise, unlocking efficiency, reducing costs, and building long-term resilience.

Looking ahead

The Climate Capital Summit highlighted a decisive shift: climate risk is no longer treated as a standalone category. It’s now embedded into day-to-day resilience decisions, from energy optimisation and long-term infrastructure planning to mortgage markets and capital allocation.

At Mitiga Solutions, we see climate intelligence as a foundation for many outcomes, from enterprise risk management to regulatory compliance, from infrastructure adaptation to capital allocation. Our role is to make science decision-ready, so that organisations can integrate physical climate risk into strategy, operations, and disclosure.

As trillions in capital move into energy and infrastructure, the question is not whether climate intelligence is needed, but how quickly it can be applied. Because while resilience requires investment, the cost of inaction will always be greater.