Extreme climate occasions have gotten extra frequent, intense, and dear. 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 Business). Looking forward, a 2024 World Economic Forum report predicts that by 2050, climate-intensified pure disasters might result in $12.5 trillion in financial losses worldwide (World Economic Forum).
At the identical time, company publicity to local weather dangers is predicted to triple by mid-century, with over $1.14 trillion in market worth in danger for firms listed on main world exchanges (Axios).
However, there’s additionally an enormous alternative on the horizon. According to a 2025 report by FIC and Bain & Company, world revenues from local weather adaptation options are anticipated to develop from $1 trillion as we speak 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 non-public sector. It is an area the place affect enterprise capital can play a catalytic position in accelerating applied sciences that may save lives, shield property, and create financial worth.
The Power of Adaptation & Resilience Technologies
Cisco Foundation is answering this name via its Regenerative Future Fund and grants to nonprofits. The Foundation strategically invests in revolutionary 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 firms to scale transformative adaptation options, even when quick monetary returns are unsure.
Keep studying to study extra about 5 startups and organizations the Foundation is supporting and the way they’re serving to communities adapt and construct resilience.
Responding to Rainstorms and Hurricanes: Real-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 United States and leading to widespread harm (New York Post/ Fox Weather). Real-time water information on the neighborhood degree is essential for life-saving decision-making. With hurricanes intensifying and transferring extra unpredictably, the distinction of some inches in water degree 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 degree information, resulting in insufficient early-warnings, delayed responses, and elevated harm.
Hohonu, which gives good monitoring instruments, fills this hole by delivering community-level visibility into altering water circumstances. Their inexpensive flood-monitoring sensors ship real-time, hyperlocal water degree information to weak coastal and inland communities, enabling swifter, extra knowledgeable selections round evacuations, infrastructure safety, and emergency response. The capacity to trace water ranges on a block-by-block degree 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 assist from the Cisco Foundation Regenerative Future Fund, Hohonu is scaling quickly and dealing with each authorities and business entities to deliver real-time water monitoring to each neighborhood that wants it. As Kevin Mukai, Hohonu’s COO, famous, “With Cisco Foundation’s goal of building resilient and empowered communities – not to mention Cisco’s strengths in networking, IoT, and digital transformation – the fit could not be better.”
As of 2025, Hohonu has deployed greater than 160 monitoring stations throughout 16 states, producing tens of millions of hours of publicly obtainable water degree 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. Learn extra how Hohonu helps Lee County keep forward of flooding on this video:
Predictive AI Analytics for Wildfire Management: Vibrant Planet
In 2023 and 2024, the United States skilled a few of its most harmful wildfire seasons in current reminiscence. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 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 accordance with put up hearth evaluation on the Eaton Fire performed by Vibrant Planet.
This is strictly the place Vibrant Planet’s platform is available in. It is a first-of-its-kind choice assist system that permits hearth districts, states, counties, federal businesses and utilities to know present threat and ecological well being, pinpoint priorities for threat mitigation remedies, then simulate the consequences of various remedies (akin to defensible area, 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 very best variety of buildings liable to wildfire in California, native authorities used Vibrant Planet to prioritize and plan 20,000 acres of wildfire threat discount remedies throughout forested communities. The outcome was a cohesive, community-supported roadmap that not solely lowered hearth threat but in addition improved water safety, biodiversity, and carbon storage, accredited 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 gives forecasted outcomes of various sorts and intensities of remedy, and fashions their results on wildfire likelihood and depth, which helps managers weigh and talk tradeoffs of various plans to drive public assist and funding for implementation. Through quite a few partnerships, Vibrant Planet gives a complete wildfire resilience resolution — from house-level defensible area to wildland-urban interface hazardous fuels reductions, to watershed-scale ecosystem restoration.
Cisco Foundation’s funding has supported the growth of those capabilities, enabling broader adoption of Vibrant Planet and accelerating the event of latest options, together with slope stabilization planning and ecosystem restoration assist. As hearth threat 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
Through Azolla Ventures — an impact-first investor supporting early-stage expertise firms that may obtain large-scale affect—Cisco Foundation not directly helps Rain, a startup remodeling wildfire response via autonomous plane. Building 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 speedy, dependable software to fight wildfires successfully.
The autonomous expertise behind helicopters outfitted with Rain is essential in tackling fires throughout hazardous circumstances, akin to nighttime or in rugged terrain, when conventional firefighting efforts face vital obstacles. This superior functionality can save precious response time and shield firefighters by lowering their publicity to excessive dangers.
Advanced Forest Management: Earth Force
Earth Force is advancing forest administration via remote-controlled equipment and real-time digital monitoring. By modernizing vegetation administration, Earth Force 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 Force’s remote-controlled gear permits for safer and extra exact forest clearing, considerably lowering the hazard to employees in wildfire-prone areas. This modernization addresses labor shortages in forest administration and positions communities to proactively tackle wildfire threat extra successfully.
Cisco Foundation Regenerative Future Fund helps Earth Force via an funding in Third Sphere, an early-stage fund backing AI-native founders remodeling world techniques via climate-aligned applied sciences.
Empowering Communities to Build Resiliency: Open Future Coalition
Open Future Coalition (OFC) works alongside communities to design adaptable workflows, construct capability, and foster ecosystems of observe 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 University and Warren Wilson College to assist 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 assist from the Cisco Foundation—performed a key position in shaping these instruments via real-world use throughout 35+ undertaking websites, laying the groundwork for a “living 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 affect and mobilize the assets they should construct resilient communities.
Building a More Resilient Future
Cisco Foundation’s Regenerative Future Fund and resiliency-related grants are integral elements of the corporate’s broader environmental sustainability technique, the Plan for Possible, in addition to our long-standing catastrophe response efforts. This begins with worker fundraising campaigns and grants to nonprofits that assist communities within the quick aftermath of a catastrophe. It extends to Cisco Crisis Response deployments that use our expertise to assist first responders, and to longer-term resilience and restoration efforts with our expertise, our individuals, and our assets.
Learn extra about how the Cisco Foundation helps resiliency on cisco.com
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