The Business Case for Adaptation

[00:00:02] Keith Zakheim:

Welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast. I am your host, Keith Zakheim. Today, as we do with every podcast, we're going to ask our guest one question and one question only. What is your Age of Climate adoption story? A little bit about the Age of Adoption: We live in an era where enterprises of every shape and size, regardless of industry, must rapidly transform to become more sustainable and climate sensitive. My day job is CEO of the marketing public relations firm Antenna Group. Our agency works exclusively with conscious brands. What is a conscious brand? It is a brand that is conscious of its responsibility to be on the right side of history. Like most businesses, our clients are experiencing a transition from an age of innovation, an era in which technologists, entrepreneurs and investors focused on innovating climate and sustainable solutions to this age of adoption which characterizes the world today. So, if you accept the Age of Adoption hypothesis, then there's really only one salient question to be asked: What is your Age of Adoption story?  

Emilie Mazzacurati's career in climate change didn't begin in venture capital or technology. It began in public policy. Trained in political science and public affairs, Emilie started her career in Europe, working in government at both the European Parliament and the City of Paris before coming to the United States to pursue a master's in public policy. Like many of her generation, her career trajectory shifted after watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Emilie realized that nothing else really matters if we don't address climate change, and she set out to translate climate science into something markets and businesses could actually act upon. She first worked in carbon markets during the early days of the European emissions trading system, helping investors and corporations understand what climate policy meant for real world economics. When federal climate policy in the U.S. stalled, Emilie made another pivot from preventing climate change to actually adapting to its impacts. That shift led her to found Four Twenty Seven, one of the first companies focusing on helping corporations and investors understand physical climate risk. Years before climate risk became mainstream, Emilie and her team built tools that translated complex climate models into actionable insights and signals for businesses, managing assets across thousands and eventually millions of locations. In 2019, she sold Four Twenty Seven to Moody's, where she helped to integrate climate data into global financial and risk analytics. But her work did not stop there, as she saw a major gap in how markets support climate adaptation. So Emilie went on to cofound Tailwind Futures, an investment innovation platform focused on accelerating solutions that help businesses and communities withstand a rapidly changing climate. Today on the Age of Adoption podcast, Emilie explains why climate adaptation has quietly moved from a moral argument to a business imperative. How companies are investing in resilience even amid political headwinds. And why the next wave of climate innovation won't be about virtue, but about economics, risk and survival. Back with Emilie Mazzacurati faster than climate risk becomes a balance sheet issue.

[00:03:34] Keith Zakheim:

Emilie, welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast.

[00:03:37] Emilie Mazzacurati:

Thank you.

[00:03:38] Keith Zakheim:

It's great to have you here. And we're going to dig in today into Tailwind Futures and you being the founding partner, I'm sure you're going to have a lot to say on that. But ultimately, I think the through line through your career has been taking kind of climate science into actionable financial and operational strategies. And, you know, in an age of adoption that's so important, kind of accelerating how companies kind of build real world resilience in a world of escalating climate threats and impacts. So we'll unpack all of that. But Emilie, as somebody who has founded an investment firm in the space and has really had a storied career in the private sector, public sector, North America, Europe, et cetera, love to hear and learn more about your career journey and, you know, our listeners. The feedback we get is that this, for many of our listeners is the most compelling part of the podcast. So I'll give you the floor and look forward to hearing about your career journey.

[00:04:37] Emilie Mazzacurati:

All right, well, thanks for having me. I, as you mentioned, I am from Europe. I am French originally and was trained in public policy, political science, worked in government, both the European Parliament and local government, City of Paris, and came to the United States to pursue a master's in public policy as well, and then fell into the private sector a little bit by accident and never looked back. And the reason I never looked back is because I've found that being in the private sector, being a private sector stakeholder and agent, has given me a lot of credibility in helping private sector corporations, investors move capital towards things that I and many other care about, like climate issues. I wasn't necessarily thinking I was going to work in climate, but I, like many people, was very influenced by Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, which I saw on campus back in 2006 when it came out. And I was like, oh, that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to work on climate because nothing else matters in terms of nothing else matters without taking care of climate as well. That led to my working first on carbon markets. So I worked for a market intelligence provider in carbon markets back in 2005, when the European Emission Trading System was getting started, we had extensive conversations in the US about cap-and-trade programs regionally and possibly at the federal level. And so my job was to help translate those policy conversations, those incoming regulations, the bills in Congress, translate those into market signals for our private sector clients, investors, large emitters, corporations, developers of carbon offsets, who all wanted to understand how much might a ton of carbon cost did that for a couple of years. We all want to know where that policy went, or for those who don't know, federal level, it went away and nothing happened for 10 years. For me, that was the time where I decided to switch from working on how do we prevent climate change into how do we deal with the impacts of climate change? And that was not only me being a little bit jaded about what policy developments might look like after the epic failure of the cap and trade bill in Congress in 2010, but also reading the science and back 15 years ago, 16 years ago, the science was already saying that we are locked in a lot of impacts from climate change, that regardless of how quickly we reduce emissions, there are enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we are going to experience a lot of impacts from climate change, which we're seeing now every day. That remains true. Also, we have not reduced greenhouse gases remotely as much as we need. And so we have a lot to deal with. And even if we stop timing tomorrow, we would still have a lot of impacts to manage for the coming decades and beyond. So adaptation and climate risk. I started a company called Four Twenty Seven and our focus was on helping corporations and investors understand what were in climate models and what kind of what climate science was saying about the physical impacts of climate change to help them manage those risks. And interestingly enough, when we started, there was nothing. The only way you could see what was in climate models was to go on the World bank website, where you got like a jumbled graph that was completely illegible to a lay person, which I was. So I hired folks who really understood the science, folks who knew how business worked. And we put our heads together and created a platform where our clients were able to enter a large number of locations, hundreds, thousands, eventually millions of locations, and get clear risk signals of which location was at risk from what kind of climate hazards in terms of floods and wildfire and heat stress. At the time it was very novel, and at the time, nobody cared. It took a while for the market to pay attention. It's become very commoditized and it's become very widespread, which is A success. This is what we wanted. I sold my company to Moody's, Moody's Corporation, ratings agency and data analytics provider back in 2019 and spent a few years helping integrate our own products and data as well as grow the offering of climate and feeding climate data into the broader offering of Moody's and then went on to create Tailwind Futures. And so with Tailwind moved away from public markets where a lot of my work was before, to focus on the innovation ecosystem. And I co-founded Tailwind with my co-founder, Katie McDonald, who came from the climate tech innovation ecosystem. And so she had seen in the past 10 years how incubators, accelerators, venture capital played a role in helping technologies that we need from a climate standpoint get to the age of adoption. But we didn't see that ecosystem supporting or really understanding where the opportunities were in adaptation and resilience. So with Tailwind, we started initially educating the market, accelerators, incubators, venture funds, helping them understand what is adaptation. We created a taxonomy, we provided extensive market analysis through the playbook, and in that process then started investing into adaptation and resilient startups ourselves.

[00:10:06] Keith Zakheim:  

Yeah, you know, and so that brings us to Tailwind Futures and we're going to, we're going to dig into that a little bit more. And so ultimately we're talking about a platform that invests in and accelerates the tools that will help businesses withstand a rapidly changing climate. Full stop. Right. There's a lot of different investments, things that you can do, but that ultimately is a recognition that there's a changing climate and we need to adapt our behaviors accordingly, both in communities and businesses. Amazingly, amazingly, the full stop around there is climate change itself is controversial. And so I'm going to frame the age of adoption question like this because there is this asymmetry in terms of the fact that clearly the market companies are investing more in resiliency. That market continues to grow. You've seen obviously a business opportunity there. At the same time, we're living in a world that's post science, post data, post truth, or certainly many people subscribe to that. We're living in a world in which the United States, the largest economy in the world, the most powerful country in the world, is withdrawing daily. Last week, I don't know how many more of these multi lateral treaties around climate United States has withdrawn from the business community, although it does continue to invest significantly in this, at the same time is relatively muted and not taking the same leadership, platform and stance as they had in the past in terms of amplifying the message around climate change. So I think that for many when they read the newspaper, if they do that anymore, they rely more on social media and if they listen to a podcast or what have you, they walk away with the impression. And my family does this even though I'm in this business every single day. The impression is that these political headwinds, maybe cultural headwinds themselves, are ultimately inhibiting the investments around adaptation that we need the investments around resiliency. Our experience as an agency is that's not the case. So Emilie, my Age of Adoption question, I hope you can address some of that. And the question is coming. So take a deep breath. What is your Age of Adoption story?

[00:12:20] Emilie Mazzacurati:

All right. There's a lot packed in there. Where do I start? I'm going to start by saying we've come a long way on climate and we've dealt with many, many years of, if not decades of disinformation and denying the science, denying the facts. And oddly enough, I want to say on adaptation, on climate change, we've sort of moved on, right? We're not 15 years ago I lived in Washington D.C. there were ads in the metro saying climate change was a hoax. Right? There were conversations, there were doubt in the population about the fact that this was really happening. And we're not there anymore.

[00:13:00] Keith Zakheim:  

We are at, we do have a president who says it at press conferences, although what is amazing about this president saying it is at the same time Greenland for him has become a strategic objective. And that's only because climate change is making that a reality.  

[00:13:18] Emilie Mazzacurati:

I think if you look at the data on surveys on understanding of basic climate science, everybody like the large majority of Americans, the large majority of corporations know that climate change is happening and know that the effects are already being felt. So we've come a really long way we where the debate nowadays is and the dominant narrative that I use from people who used to be climate deniers is now, well, yes, it's happening, but it's okay. Like it's, it's fine. We'll just deal with it. Right. Which worries me. There's a bit of a silver lining in that if people actually use that to make investments in adaptation and preparing for the impacts of climate change, that is a little bit of momentum that we can all use. But the conversation is not anymore on is this happening? But is on is it worth the cost of preventing it? No, it's fine. We'll deal with it. Right. So, so that's one thing what I hear in the business community is that people are a lot quieter about the climate work that they're doing, both from a marketing and communication standpoint. And I'm sure you experienced that as well. Also in terms of disclosures, absolutely sticking to the bare minimum of what they have to say. But that doesn't mean the work is stopping. The work is going on internally to think about how they can reduce generally environmental footprint and specifically greenhouse gas emissions, and how they can prepare for the impacts of climate change. Because the businesses know that politics come and go, but generally the sentiment in the population and the general direction is that we're going to have to deal with this problem. And so undoing all their years of effort around climate and sustainability because the current administration is not supportive is not a good business move for most of them. We of course see businesses who are happy to be moving away from those, but from what I see, it's a minority in the large corporations. So when it comes to adaptation, we are with tailwind. We're trying to fast track innovation and adaptation. Our mandate is to accelerate the development of and the deployment of adaptation and resilience solutions. And so this is where our work combines both investing in and supporting early stage innovators who have adaptation and resilience solutions and at the same time working with corporations who might, could, should be customers of those technologies or could be partners, distribution partners, product development partners, and, and help get those products to the market. We don't have time to wait for a full cycle of this tiny company that's going to become very big in 10 years. Like we need the solutions in three years and what's the fastest path to market if we want to get those things distributed further out and ready to scale. It is in my mind, through those partnerships with larger corporations. And so for us, it's about working with the corporations who see that growing need and that demand for adaptation and resilience solutions and want to be at the forefront of investing, supporting, seeing what's on the market and being a provider of solutions themselves.

[00:16:32] Keith Zakheim:

Yeah, and what we've experienced also is it's not that enterprise companies are silencing themselves around their investments around climate sustainability adaptation. They're just talking about them differently. Right. So it's not about, it's not a virtue conversation anymore. It's not, you know, taking the high road. We're doing it. It's about the economics, work, energy abundance. We have to get all electrons on the grid regardless of where they're coming from. It's about if we're going to site data centers. We have to have resiliency around that. We can't do it in coastal areas. We got to do them in deserts, for example, or areas where there's no extreme weather. So they're talking about all these things, they're making these investments and talking about them. It's just the language and I think the tenor of how they talk about them is very different, which to me also signals the maturation of the climate sustainability industry, where you can really make persuasive and compelling arguments for investments here without having to get into these cataclysmic predictions of doom and gloom.

[00:17:37] Emilie Mazzacurati:

I think that's a good point. And I think for resilience there is a natural flow into not being a virtuous or impact investment, although it is of course also an impact investment, but it is a business investment. And very often it will be directly under the CFO or the risk office responsibility or a joint partnership with folks in the sustainability who have that context and education about climate change in general and then helping folks in climate in the risk of understand how that might affect the way they look at certain risks and how risks are going to evolve over time.

[00:18:12] Keith Zakheim:

Yeah, it's funny, we. So of course, like probably most businesses that are heavily indexed towards climate sustainability, we were concerned about, you know, what business would look like in 2025 based on the political issues. And, and we had really, really strong 2025 Q3 and Q4 particularly. But where, where it was strong is interesting is we've had a lot of work and, and, and opportunities in the data center space. And the reason for that I think actually tracks very closely to our conversation, which is ultimately what are the most salient issues for database for data centers. Right. So you've got water reuse, you've got energy abundance, you've got grid modernization. At the end of the day, like those are all resiliency, climate sustainability issues. You can frame it any way you want, but that's what these companies need to grapple with.

[00:19:02] Emilie Mazzacurati:  

I think what we're seeing in the climate tech market is that switched as well from we're doing the right thing to we're doing something that makes sense from a business standpoint. And so in the intro chat you were saying we might not have experienced the same level of interest and traction 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago. Even talking about adaptation, I was there doing an adaptation business back 10, five years ago. And yes, it was much more of an uphill battle. Nowadays there is much more interest, but there is still a Lot of questions around, what does that mean? How do I do it? What are the right solutions? What are the problems that I need to address? And so this is where we hope to help accelerate that conversation so that we can move dollars faster, move products faster and help people on the ground.

[00:19:51] Keith Zakheim:

What's like one emerging resilience technology that today is, hasn't gotten to scale yet, may still be more on the innovation side, but you think will be mainstream within, I don't know, one to five years, two to five years, five to 10 years, what have you.

[00:20:06] Emilie Mazzacurati:

All right. Depending on the time frame, I'm going to take the longer view. I think five years plus we are seeing some really interesting innovation around phase change materials and their ability to cool people or animals without, without actually cooling the air around them. Right. So you could be outside in a bus stop or you could be in a dairy farm under a shed, and there's a material on the roof that is sucking heat out of the buildings underneath. And heat is increasingly, rapidly becoming the biggest concern for a lot of people and a lot of corporations for very legitimate reasons. And so I think technologies that help us keep people and things cool outdoors rather than cooling the indoor of a building are going to be, are going to become widespread. We're seeing some early startups on the market already. We're seeing technologies being spun out of universities. And as it becomes, as people realize that those technologies can help solve their problems, I think we're going to see a lot more of those.

[00:21:13] Keith Zakheim:

And I can see government being a huge customer for that.

[00:21:15] Emilie Mazzacurati:

Yeah. And private sector, everyone, you have a construction site, you have people, you know, workers outside who need to cool off. You have a cultural or sport event where people are outdoors. People die at concerts nowadays and they die in marathons and they die doing, bringing your mail. Right. And so all the technologies that can either keep an individual cool or that can provide a cool space that isn't an air-conditioned space, I think are going to see a lot of fractions and animals like farm animals, they, they die of heat too. Like it's, it's a big issue in the farming industry as well.

[00:21:51] Keith Zakheim:

Oh, fascinating. Well, Emilie, thank you so much for the time. Really appreciate your perspective, your story and I look forward to our paths crossing again in the future.

[00:21:59] Emilie Mazzacurati:

Likewise. Thanks for having me. My pleasure.

[00:22:02] Keith Zakheim:

The Age of Adoption podcast features CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers sharing their climate and sustainability business transformation stories. Episodes can be found on your favorite podcast apps, including iTunes and Spotify. The Age of Adoption Podcast is brought to you by Antenna Group. Antenna is the home of conscious brands. We partner with companies that don't wait for change to happen. These brands shape the future, are awake and already moving, unsure if you are a conscious brand or even if you are one, whether you are positioned as one, Please visit our website at www.antennagroup.com and take the Conscious Compass Assessment, a groundbreaking tool that enables enterprises to assess their brand against the eight traits of brand consciousness. At Antenna, we partner with companies big and small, from growth stage to Fortune 100, to tell their climate and sustainability stories. So once again, if you're interested in joining the conscious brand movement and learning more about Antenna Group, please check out our website at www.antennagroup.com. ping us on LinkedIn and make sure to visit the Conscious Compass.

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