ForcesofNature

Resilience and insurance have long been treated as separate conversations. Amelie Fava-Verde is one of the people connecting them.

At Chubb, she is embedding physical climate risk into underwriting, translating exposure into the language of practical financial decision-making. Having built the firm's resilience practice from the ground up, her focus is on making resilience evidence-based and quantifiable, so organizations can tell which interventions meaningfully cut risk.

The through-line is a tighter link between resilience investment and insurance outcomes. If hardening an asset changes its risk, that should show up in coverage and terms, and that connection is what builds the business case for action at scale. With over 15 years of environmental risk and engineering advisory at KPMG, Arcadis, Atkins, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, Arcadis backs the argument.

Jay was one of the first thought leaders in climate adaptation and a pioneer in adaptation and resilience investment.

As Managing Director and Co-Founder of The Lightsmith Group, Jay runs a global investment platform built on a conviction that adaptation is an investable market, not a policy afterthought. Through CRAFT, the Climate Resilience & Adaptation Finance & Technology Facility, he launched one of the first private investment strategies dedicated purely to resilience and adaptation, securing over $186 million in initial growth equity commitments.

He built much of this market himself, co-founding GARI (the Global Adaptation & Resilience Investment Working Group) to assemble a global investor community around adaptation and resilience. He also brings that thinking into the classroom, having developed and lead a course on Climate Adaptation & Resilience Finance at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, examining the state of public and private adaptation finance, the hard problems of measuring physical climate risk, and the new instruments needed to turn a thin pipeline of investments into a real market.

Today he is one of the earliest and most credible voices on how resilience turns into returns, and on where the capital to fund it comes from.

Few people have done more to move climate resilience out of the sustainability report and into the investment committee.

At Carlyle, Steve co-leads global sustainability, building ESG and climate resilience into investment decisions and into how portfolio companies create value. He conceived and led Carlyle's Investing in Resilience Framework, developed with Marsh to give companies a stronger financial reason to act before climate losses occur. Getting there meant bringing investors, insurers, reinsurers, engineers and risk experts to the same table, so that forward-looking climate risk analysis could be tied to practical resilience measures and the insurance benefits they can earn.

The framework is now being rolled out across 10 Carlyle portfolio companies and the firm's U.S. and European Real Estate businesses, and three insurance carriers are road-testing it. Beyond Carlyle, Steve is a leading thought leader on physical climate resilience, and his work is helping change how the market talks about it. Where the conversation once stopped at recogniszing climate risk, he is pushing investors and insurers to quantify it and act on it, with insurability and long-term value protection as the measures that count.

Adelle is closing the gap between climate risk science and real-work implementation

As Senior Director of Climate Adaptation at NRDC and Vice Chair of IPCC Working Group II, Adelle leads global work on climate adaptation and loss and damage, helping close the gap between climate risk science and real-world implementation. Her influence reaches from international frameworks to national adaptation plans and climate finance strategies, shaping how governments and institutions understand and respond to climate impacts.

Her focus is on the places with the most at stake and the fewest resources to respond: Small Island Developing States, Least Developed Countries and under-resourced communities. She champions adaptation that is equitable and adequately financed, so vulnerable countries and communities have the agency, resources and institutional capacity to act. By bringing science, policy, finance and implementation communities together, she is helping scale adaptation and loss and damage solutions that reach the people who need them most.

Turns resilience science into action

Dr. Al-Humaiqani advances climate resilience across research, policy, and practice, developing approaches to identify, prioritize, and manage climate and systemic risks. His work examines interdependencies across critical sectors and supports resilience planning, climate adaptation, and informed decision-making for the built environment and infrastructure.

His career has been built on putting research into practice. He has helped develop carbon and resilience dashboards, led life cycle assessment studies, and supported sustainability delivery for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 stadiums and other major construction projects, with contributions recognized by the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy. He also served as lead principal investigator for the climate change Knowledge, Attitude and Practice study commissioned by Qatar’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

Internationally, he serves as a UNFCCC climate negotiator and adviser to Yemen’s Ministry of Water and Environment, supporting adaptation, mitigation, and resilience governance. Across these roles, he connects academia, government, and industry, bringing scientific evidence into policy, decision-support tools, and practical implementation. He shares his expertise through peer-reviewed research, mentoring, technical workshops, and training for professionals from more than 80 nationalities.