Climate risks are challenging municipal budgets, impairing revenue sources, and changing investor calculus. Leading cities are not only proactively mitigating these risks but positioning themselves for greater economic development by investing in resilient infrastructure. Join this session to explore how CRE investors assess city resilience, how those assessments impact investor decisions, and how the public and private sectors can work together to protect cities and assets. 

Sponsored by Arcadis

As natural hazards intensify, real estate investors and developers face growing exposure to property damage, tenant displacement, and business interruption. Beyond asset performance, ensuring business continuity through property-level resilience investments also boosts community resilience.  Yet traditional underwriting does not account for the economic benefits of resilience improvements in multifamily properties, missing the upside of stabilized rent rolls, lower insurance risk, and ensuring that critical building systems remain operational to preserve habitability before, during, and after extreme weather events. At the same time, insurers and reinsurers are recalibrating their risk models, creating new opportunities for owners who can demonstrate resilient construction and operations. This session will discuss efforts to integrate resilient investments into both real estate and insurance underwriting and showcase how resilience upgrades in multifamily housing can protect cash flow and preserve asset value.

Explore financing approaches, innovative tools, and funding sources that enable integration of climate resilience features on a variety of property types to support long-term value and risk reduction. Attendees will hear case studies from three commercial real estate leaders revealing 1) how private financing along with public funding and evolving regulatory requirements can enable project-level resilience, 2) how green bonds can help fund resilience measures across a real estate portfolio and 3) how Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing can be a source of capital for resilience measures as part of new construction or property renovation. 

Sponsored by Wells Fargo

While many real estate firms are reporting the physical climate risks within their portfolios to institutional investors and other stakeholders, fewer are taking action at the property level and during individual deal-level decisions. This session explores how leading real estate owners and investors are taking the next step: embedding climate resilience into capital planning and asset management for owned assets and during investment due diligence and underwriting for capital providers. This session will also explore how climate risk assessments and resilience investments connect to property insurance strategies, generating potential ROI. 

The panelists from AvalonBay Communities and Park Hotels & Resorts will share real-world examples and case studies of ASTM Property Resilience Assessments (PRAs) being used for decision-making for site-specific retrofit designs, as well as integrating resilience strategies into capital planning and asset management processes. In addition, we’ll discuss how Harrison Street, a global private equity manager, has built a scalable framework for integrating climate risk into deal diligence, underwriting, portfolio monitoring, and insurance strategy. 

The panelists’ perspectives include unique insights from a variety of property types including hospitality, multifamily, student and senior housing, and data center. They will share success stories, innovations, and lessons learned in aligning resiliency with investment decisions, as well as decision frameworks, implementation challenges, and practical insights for developers, investors, and public-private collaborators. Attendees will leave with practical insights on how to embed climate risk management into their own organizations, how investment committee memos are changing to capture physical risk and insurability considerations, and how PRAs are informing CapEx decisions and shaping long-term asset strategies as a driver of asset value, risk mitigation, defensive positioning, and operational continuity.