The risks and costs imposed by climate-disrupting pollution are real, pervasive, and getting worse. This is an observable reality, not a forecast. Local communities, regional economies, and international supply chains, are all facing rising costs and increased risk of operational failure. 

• In practical terms: Prices are rising, insurance is harder to obtain, and communities are facing new kinds of danger at unprecedented scale.
• In political terms: Public spending becomes less efficient, undermining services and creating costly fiscal stress that can undermine overall economic stability.
• Operationally: Innovation pressures are intensifying, which means proven methods can become obsolete almost without warning.

Climate preparedness and resilience planning (CPR) is an operational imperative. The pervasive cost and hightened risk of major disruptions, coupled with reduced access to insurance and higher cost of capital, together mean lack of climate resilience is a potentially destabilizing weakness. 

This has real effects on competitiveness: Just as AI is altering workflows and upending long-held assumptions about information integrity, climate resilience will create major, sometimes sudden new advantages for those who get ahead of the curve and develop new capabilities suited to a climate-stressed world. 

Climate science is evidence, not theory. In the United States, where the First Amendment prohibits any law or government action that reduces the right to pursue legal redress, intentionally ignoring that information and then causing harm to innocent third parties will result in litigation. 

Several factors are important considerations for local governments, businesses, developers, financial institutions, and the federal government: 

1. In 2007, the Supreme Court found that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
2. The absence of clear regulatory guidance does not reduce the obligation to avoid harming people through wanton pollution.
3. The First Amendment not only protects the right to legal redress; it also prohibits laws or government actions that limit the right to gather and share evidence related to breaches of anyone’s rights.
4. Infrastructure, financial arrangements, and major businesses that are dependent on or facilitate such pollution can face liability.
5. All judges have been advised by the International Court of Justice to interpret environmental rights as being embedded in foundational human rights.

In a 2024 study by Resources for the Future (RFF), which examined 79 counties across 10 states, “fossil fuels generated more than $10,000 per capita in government revenue in 5 of the 79 sample counties reviewed and more than $1,000 per capita in 28 counties.” Many of these counties depend on those revenues for roads, schools, and other infrastructure and services. 

As the imperatives of climate risk reduction spread—whether at shock speed or slowly due to federal policy reversals—those revenues will be thinned out. This will happen in several ways: 

1. The operations in question will see cost of capital increase and insurability decline, making it harder to keep going.
2. As the wider economy shifts to safer, cleaner, less costly alternatives, margins in polluting industries will likely shrink.
3. As costs of climate risk and impact rise—including pervasive costs embedded in all other goods and services—what revenues do come in will not go as far.

Beyond these direct impacts, the loss of these industries and of related revenues will undermine investment in other services, making it less attractive for other investors to create jobs; this will reduce property values, undermine employment, and further strain public budgets. These conditions also make it less cost-effective to acquire insurance or access capital for new development. 

Local communities, municipal and county governments, and small and medium-sized enterprises, are all facing financial and operational risks from unchecked climate disruption. These tensions will be exacerbated by another transition happening at the same time, in which slow-onset climate risks like sea-level rise, start to become regular and eventually everyday crises. It will not only be shock events that impose real and lasting costs. 

Federal and state-level assistance will also become harder to secure, as health costs rise steadily, across all regions, due to the effects of excessive heat, more frequent damaging storms, depletion of ecosystems that support abundant production of natural, unprocessed foods. Studies by the Natural Resources Defense Council (2021) and the Climate Investment Funds (2024) find health costs due to climate inaction could rise by hundreds of bilions of dollars per decade.

Between jurisdictions that have effective climate preparedness and resilience (CPR) meaures in place and those that do not, insurers and investors will favor those places with lower risk and better CPR value. In other words, removal of the Endangerment Finding, if allowed to go forward and if it undermines national momentum toward climate resilience, will require local communities and economic actors to step up and do far more. 

The City Food Finance Principles provide a lens through which municipalities can leverage sustainability-focused budgeting to support wider economic opportunity across the surrounding region. Localizing financial innovation can support important CPR needs: 

• Funding for value-building, sustainable development needs to get to the places where it will improve lives, livelihoods, and long-term outlook, more efficiently.
• Strategies and metrics to track performance need to be more relevant to local conditions, so more can be achieved in the short-term, and the benefits can endure, attract further investment, and compound positive effects.

Local banks, communities, and national policy-makers, should explore ways to support commercial banking serving both finance and data needs, to help bring CPR innovations into the mainstream. The most resilient communities will be havens for people, capital, and institutions; making sure the resources are there to support meaningful risk reduction is an obvious need.

Those local financial services can include everyday banking with specific services for small producers, rural communities, climate-related risk reduction and operational upgrades, and incubation support for new business models. Communities, counties, and states that are heavily dependent on fossil fuel businesses for revenues—especially those with 10% or more of revenues from one or two sources—should incentivize investable opportunities for rapid diversification of small and medium-sized enterprises operating and hiring locally. 

Instruments for expanding access to capital can include the following, some of which can be used to catalyze wider ad hoc investment through co-investment mechanisms:

1. sustainability-linked loans; 
2. bonds with a blue, green, or climate label, which can be issued by one or more entities in collaboration; 
3. impact-oriented equity and venture investing; 
4. blended financing, combining grants and public incentives with equity, venture, and other financial support, to reduce risk and expand access to capital;
5. cooperative de-risking across value chains, leveraging climate data to improve overall performance; 
6. insurance-linked securities, to expand funding available to respond to disasters and support more affordable access to needed insurance products; 
7. pay-for-performance contracts and revenue-sharing. 

The best path forward for small and medium-sized enterprises, and for the security and development of counties and communities, is to enact smart, focused CPR policies and make sure to stay ahead of the innovation curve. Inaction = cost, while resources will become more scarce at all levels. There is no way around that fact. 

The time to shape the future is now. 

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