Resilient: How extreme weather is affecting cities

Record date: 8/27/25
Air date: 10/8/25

Extreme weather is creating unprecedented challenges for cities worldwide, with events like Valencia’s record-breaking rainfall and the L.A. wildfires highlighting the urgent need for urban resilience. Drawing on experience from New York City's $20 billion climate adaptation program and global initiatives like 100 Resilient Cities, the conversation emphasizes the importance of integrated risk assessment, updated infrastructure, and innovative solutions that include a mix of green, blue and gray infrastructure. The episode stresses the financial and social benefits of investing in resilience, noting that cities with robust adaptation plans see better credit ratings, lower risks, and a stronger return on investment. As urbanization accelerates, collaboration between public and private sectors and a clear focus on risk-informed planning are essential for future-ready cities. Ultimately, building resilience is not just about protection—it’s a strategic advantage for municipalities and businesses alike.

In the final episode of the Future of Risk podcast miniseries, our host Arooran "Aroo" Sivasubramaniam, Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions is joined by Alexander Mirescu, Head of Extreme Weather and Climate and Daniel Zarrilli, Former Chief Resilience Officer to discuss how municipalities can adapt to more frequent and intense storms, flooding, heat, and wildfires.

In this miniseries, other episodes include:

8/27/25: Immediate risks extreme weather poses to your business
9/10/25: How extreme weather impacts construction
9/24/25: Top things C-suite leaders need to know now about extreme weather

Guest:

Alexander Mirescu
Head of Extreme Weather and Climate
Zurich Resilience Solutions
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As a specialist consultant in urban resilience, climate risk, and disaster risk reduction with over 17 years of experience in the management consulting, global development, municipal, academic, and research sectors, Alexander Mirescu took on the role of Head of Extreme Weather at Zurich Resilient Solutions in April of 2025. Engaging with the public and private sectors, Mirescu leads a diverse team that focuses on identifying the multiple hazards and risk his clients face and bringing critical extreme weather and climate risk evaluation tools, as well as resilience-focused engineering to market. Through building critical partnerships and addressing sector-specific climate risks, his work consistently speaks to the unique ROI of resilience and adaptation as the key driver to understanding the benefits of resilience and adaptation in communication and practice.

Daniel Zarrilli
Former Chief Resilience Officer
New York City
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Daniel Zarrilli is currently Columbia University’s first Chief Climate & Sustainability Officer, leading efforts to meet the institution’s climate and sustainability goals through its Plan 2030 strategy. He advises senior leadership and fosters collaboration across the university on climate-related initiatives. Prior to Columbia, he served as NYC’s Chief Climate Policy Advisor, launching major resilience programs and climate legislation. Daniel is a licensed Professional Engineer and holds degrees from MIT and Lehigh University.

Host:

Arooran ”Aroo” Sivasubramaniam
Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions
Zurich North America
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As Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions for North America, Arooran Sivasubramaniam is responsible for the direction, growth and management of business resilience services to establish ZRS NA as a leader and trusted partner in the evolving risk prevention space.

(PLEASE NOTE: This is an edited podcast transcript, capturing speakers with natural speech patterns that may include incomplete sentences and/or asides, grammatical errors, verbal shorthand and some statements that may be less clear in print.)

Episode transcript

AROORAN SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Valencia, Spain received an entire season's worth of rain in eight hours, resulting in flooding and mudslides. The L.A. Wildfires were exacerbated by dry ground conditions and powerful winds. How can cities prepare themselves for the unexpected in this age of extreme weather? Welcome to Future Risk presented by Zurich North America. We explore the changing risk and resilience landscape and share insights on the challenges that face businesses to help you meet tomorrow prepared. This is the final episode in our Extreme Weather Podcast miniseries. Today, we're going to focus on what extreme weather means to municipalities and what cities can do about these increasing challenges.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

I'm Arooran Sivasubramaniam, Head of Zurich Resilient Solutions for North America, and today I'm speaking with Alex Mirescu, Head of Extreme Weather at Zurich Resilience Solutions and Dan Zarrilli, former Chief Resilience Officer for the City of New York. Welcome to the podcast, Dan, Alex.

DANIEL ZARRILLI:

Great to be here.

ALEXANDER MIRESCU:

Very excited for the discussion. Thanks for inviting me.

Leading resilience: Zarrilli’s role in NYC’s climate strategy

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Let's start with an introduction. Dan, what's your current role and what work did you do with the City of New York?

ZARRILLI:

Yeah, great, Aroo. I'm currently serving as the Chief Climate and Sustainability Officer here at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia and joining higher education, I had a long career with the City of New York. [I held] a variety of roles in the mayor's office relating to climate sustainability and resilience under two mayors, including as the Chief Resilience Officer for many years after the devastation we saw under Hurricane Sandy. In that time, we launched $20 billion of climate adaptation and resilience investments, really covering the gamut of risks that we face from coastal storms, sea level rise, more intense precipitation, heat and--resulting in a lot of reduced risk in our hospital infrastructure, in our housing, in our communities, all across our infrastructure in ways that we will be benefiting from here in New York City for many years to come.

Elevating Urban Resilience Worldwide

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

So, Dan, you work with 100 Resilient Cities, through the Rockefeller Foundation. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

ZARRILLI:

The Rockefeller Foundation and its 100 Resilient Cities program was a really innovative program that was launched in the years after Hurricane Sandy and really recognizing that cities all over the world are facing a variety of risks, both acute risks, chronic risks, sort of everyday challenges that they face, as well as the things that are more devastating. The big storms, the natural disasters. Through that program, New York City put out the world's first resilience strategy called OneNYC. That really helped us take stock of our risk across climate, but also looking around questions of economic inequality, failing infrastructure, all the sort of challenges that we face as a city, and helped us prioritize and put forward plans. The real value in a program, in a network like that, of course, was the ability to work with our colleagues in cities around the world, the chief resilience officers. On every continent we’re all facing similar challenges. Cities are facing all sorts of common threats. We have locally specific conditions, of course, but the ability to share best practices to come together and think about, one, how to think about risk, but also what to do about it. An incredibly powerful program that helped bring practitioners around the world and really elevated the practice of resilience in urban conditions around the world.

Designing for the future: Resilience in a changing climate

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

I'm curious, how do you see the increasing frequency of extreme weather impacting how municipalities operate?

ZARRILLI:

Well, so the thing that we face here in New York City — I think for a couple of good examples on this. It's not only that we're seeing, more extreme weather, we're seeing, if you want to put it this way, more extreme, extreme weather. The storm surge that we saw during Hurricane Sandy wasn't just record breaking. It broke the record by 40% from anything we'd seen before in the past. More recently in 2021, we had long standing weather stations here in Central Park that measure rainfall intensity. And we’d never seen more than two inches of rain per hour in New York City until 2021. And that record was broken. It was only broken by a little bit at the moment, but literally two weeks later we saw that record broken by another 50%. So, we have three inches of rain in an hour. And I think that the way that this is impacting cities, it's challenging us because our cities, our infrastructure, weren't built for these conditions. We're seeing not only a more extreme moment that's a little worse. We're seeing them a lot worse. And whether it's our drainage networks, our coastal protection networks, anything that we have to deal with this risk wasn't built for these conditions.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

That's very interesting. Everyone I talk to; they know that comes up very often. Right? So, what we used to think was a one in a hundred-year event or one in five-year event now is like once every two or three years, it seems to be occurring.

ZARRILLI:

And I think that's just the function of a changing climate, what's happening in our atmosphere is changing what we think of as normal, and it's happening all over the world.

MIRESCU:

A couple points I'd like to make here on the frequency and intensity. Hurricane Sandy was a seminal moment and in many ways, it launched the 100 Resilient Cities platform. And I'd like to really underscore what Dan said before about 100 Resilient Cities, that it brought what had been for a long time a very disparate set of practitioners. It was urban planners who didn't have necessarily a common language, let’s say with a transportation engineer, or with Parks and Recreation, or with a public works department within a city. So, the Rockefeller Foundation's platform 100 Resilience Cities really created a common vocabulary and a common language and brought a lot of different people from different backgrounds focusing on this issue of resilience. And prior to that, we didn't use the word resilience, very often, if at all. We tended to call it disastrous management, or more commonly disastrous reduction.

MIRESCU:

Dan's point on the changing climate reflects the fact that we have cities that have been designed for climate events from decades ago, and we are not going to return to those types of climate scenarios. At least not in my lifetime, probably. But the idea is that we are seeing storms, just as you said, Aroo, not only more frequently, but the intensity is higher. One really great example, let me not say great example, but an exemplary case of that was in Houston. I believe for three years in a row they had, three, 500-year, rainstorms. Dan, correct me if I'm wrong on that, but it was a series of these very high intensity return period events where no one had expected them to come back-to-back. So, Dan's point on this is how are we going to design cities for these new intense events and these higher frequency events, for which we're only now starting to understand what the impacts are.

ZARRILLI:

I think if I can add to that, one of the most important things we did — and this is a lesson for a lot of different cities — one of the things we did after Hurricane Sandy is we asked ourselves and really wanted to understand what just happened. And so, we went through a really rigorous process to understand the storm and what it was and what it meant for New York City. But the real key innovation is, was the next step, was to think about what else could happen. Too many cities, I think, go through a natural disaster, and then a lot of effort goes into making sure the thing that just happened never happens again, which of course is important, but it's only a part of the story. Widening your view about the risk that you face and understanding and using that moment to think about a lot of different risks, was so important for New York City to be able to put forward really comprehensive plans to deal with not just the risk of coastal storms, but putting in place the plans for more intense rainstorms, putting in place the plans for heat mitigation, for dealing with sea level rise, and then broadening it to a range of other risks through our OneNYC program, thinking about how are we dealing with cyber risk?

ZARRILLI:

How are we dealing with pandemic risk? How are we thinking about all of the other things that happened in cities. That was a moment when we really broadened our understanding of risk so that we could put real resilient solutions in place.

MIRESCU:

I'd like to add one point to that and that is one of the chief figures in urban resilience, especially when it comes to flooding, but more generally is someone, that Dan and I, I'm sure together greatly admired Henk Ovink, who is, I believe at one point he was the official Dutch ambassador for water or some sort of similar title like that. Leave it up to the Dutch and their centuries of water engineering to have a person like that. But Henk Ovink was really instrumental in speaking to what Dan just talked about. We can look at urban resilience in many ways as if it's the medical field. It's an easy field for me to look at because my father was a surgeon. And these types of events are essentially an X-ray is the word that Henk Ovink uses.

MIRESCU:

We have these shocks and then it forces us to do like an MRI or an x-ray. If someone is not feeling well, they go get an analysis. And you not only see that you maybe have a flooding problem, but as you go through the risk assessment or you look at other hazards, you discover that these things are compounded risks, and they interact. Urban heat will interact with air quality, which will interact with respiratory health, which will also then interact with green infrastructure, tree canopy stormwater management. So, we see these systems of systems, and that's one way to describe cities, but we also see them post-event. And Sandy was key for that, that it exposed a whole set of things just beyond the standard wind and flood and coastal damage that New York City experienced. And not only New York City, by the way. I mean, it was like parts of New Jersey, Jersey City, Hoboken, up into even Boston. So, it was a wider spectrum event, but it definitely served as this type of x-ray or MRI on the resilient health of a city.

Wildfire risk and the urban-rural interface

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Thanks, Alex. We seem to be speaking about risk a lot, naturally, in extreme weather. But, you know, it is quite a broad term, and we have a plethora of risks out there, and how do we help our audience a bit? Can you guys, from your experience, share what you think the top risks or maybe risks that extreme weather poses to municipalities and the residents?

ZARRILLI:

I always thought about this in a few different ways. One is the recognition that heat as a risk kills more New Yorkers than any other natural hazard. I believe that's true across all of America. It's the largest, killer of Americans, of any natural hazard.¹ When we think about financial risk, flooding typically is highest on the list, whether it's coastal storms, nor’easters, the level of vulnerability we have in the floodplain, the risk that we have there of asset loss is, you know, just on a dollar’s basis, flooding will be your highest risk. But thinking long term about the city, and particularly about natural hazard, sea level rise is probably the greatest existential risk we have in our coastal communities. New York City is a city with 520 miles of coastline.

ZARRILLI:

When Hurricane Sandy hit, we had literally zero coastal protections to speak of in New York City. And there are – depending on how you're calculating the floodplain at this point – north of 400,000, maybe growing to about 1.2 million New Yorkers over the next several decades that live in the floodplain. And as sea level rise continues to advance, there are going to be certain coastal communities that are going to become unlivable at some point. And we really haven't grappled with, as a society, what that means and how to think about relocating people out of increasingly vulnerable areas over time. It's going to be those acute moments that really highlight that vulnerability and exacerbate that. But it's a long-term slow growing, but inexorable risk that's growing in our coastal communities. So, I always thought it was helpful to think about it, one, in terms of the lives lost and the asset losses that we're seeing now – but really to think out into the future about what the future of our city looks like as these risks continue to grow. And they take on different dimensions when you think of them that way.

MIRESCU:

Yeah, I'd like to add to that, Aroo. And that is, especially in the last two, three years we have seen literally an explosion in wildfire risk, that is its own risk profile on the face of it, but it is driven by other hazards, other perils that drive it forward. So, precipitation, high wind, lack of rain, those are the immediate natural sides of it. But where it really gets interesting and where we see increasing economic impacts is in this very fragile, urban-rural interface. This is where the way we urbanize, and you can see this in cities like Los Angeles, also Denver, to move a little bit away just from the East coast models we've been talking about. These are cities that are expanding, they're urbanizing at very rapid rates and that's consistent with what we're seeing.

MIRESCU:

Generally, by 2050, something like seven in 10 humans will live in some form of urban center. That's the fastest rate of urbanization in the career of humanity. Let that sink in for a second. We are becoming city dwellers at the fastest rate in human history. That forces questions on how do we design housing and transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, how do we then adapt emergency management operations to deal with these threats. But what is a big puzzle right now is how are we urbanizing in a way that wildfire urban-rural interface, becomes something that we are more aware of, instead of really just reacting from it. And that's been a major part of how resilience has historically been designed. We tended to be reacting and managing the events rather than reducing the risks. And if we can find ways where that urban-rural wildfire interface can be better managed – and to manage that better, you need excellent climate data for sure, and risk identification, but you also need to understand where that critical infrastructure is in that interface. And that's where the engineering comes in. That's really where that key onsite engineering is a specific contribution to understanding where risk is.

Resilience as a value proposition for cities and businesses

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

That's very poignant. And again, sometimes we open up our newspapers, and we see the LA wildfires, for example, we alluded to, so we tend to think often west coast, right? It tends to get a lot of publicity. But then every week we look at it, you know, you see all across the US, East coast, West coast, Midwest, whatever it is you see in Canada, everywhere. So good point, Alex. So, it's very easy to take the doom and gloom approach of it here. And that's really not what we're trying to do right here. We need to help our communities, and some of the chief resilience officers. So, question: what are some of the strategies that cities are implementing today that maybe people learn from?

ZARRILLI:

Well, I'll always start with New York City, near and dear to my heart, of course. As we went through this process here, you know, what we launched after Hurricane Sandy, led to some really interesting projects. Thinking about our coastal risk, we have a flagship coastal resilience project here called East Side Coastal Resiliency that is helping protect 110,000 New Yorkers from flood risk. But it's not just doing it by putting up a big wall that blocks us off from our waterfront. What's happened is we've rebuilt an entire park, East River Park to serve as that flood protection and this has dual benefits. Most times you'll never even realize that there's flood protection there. It's a park, you enjoy it, you go there, you’re exercising, you're walking your dog, whatever it is, however you enjoy your park, that's what it is almost every day of the year.

ZARRILLI:

But in that moment when you need it, there are some gates. There are some active elements, but most of it is passive flood protection that's helping to protect that neighborhood in that moment when the risk appears, whether in the case of a hurricane or a nor'easter. Similarly, there's solutions for more intense rainfall, green infrastructure. There are investments in Staten Island called the Blue Belt that is providing natural drainage for rainfall events. And it's providing that natural rainfall without incurring the cost of a lot of big gray infrastructure. It's also doing it in a way that provides biodiversity benefits. It helps filter the water; it helps clean the water. So, we're getting these dual use and dual benefits and multi-benefit investments that are coming in place that are both providing the risk reduction that we need here in New York City, but they're also enhancing the livability of our city. And I think to enable us to get the buy-in to continue to make these kinds of investments. That's the sort of investment that we're going to need to continue to see is yes, the risk reduction, but also the enhanced livability and the park assets and the open space assets that we're getting from making these investments. And there are examples of this really, all over the globe.

MIRESCU:

The other interesting gray infrastructure, this is going to be a little bit of a pun Dan, is the 1 million Oysters project on Staten Island. I mean, that's not concrete, but it's the color of the oysters. Really interesting project that's going on there. I think they're using like a massive oil, uh, oyster beds, for reducing wave action. Is that one of the things that they're doing? I think I remember hearing about that one.

ZARRILLI:

So, the Billion Oysters Program is an amazing program that's helping put water filtration, biodiversity back into the harbor. And what's happening on Staten Island is something called Living Shorelines, which is a project called Living Break Waters that is on Staten Island, and its breakwaters that are also oyster reefs. And so, they're providing that biodiversity and water quality benefit. But it's also providing wave attenuation in a part of the city where flood protection doesn't quite work because of the topography that's down there. But one of the biggest devastating impacts from a coastal storm in that part of the city is wave action. And it's like waves were literally crashing on people's homes. And the devastation there was, was immense. And so, thinking about the very specific, like the very locally specific solutions, it's a great example of how New York City really had a big toolkit, but you can't put every tool in every place. But in that place, it was the oysters and the wave attenuation that are helping to provide that risk reduction, on the south shore of Staten Island.

MIRESCU:

That's a nature-based solution, I guess is one way to look at it. Aroo, there's a whole host of cities that are really doing these interesting technological approaches. Whether it's blue, gray or green infrastructure, or a mixture of all of that. Within the New York context, about two years ago there was a piece in New York Times, like a two-page spread, about a heavy post tropical rain event, that really devastated a lot of the region. But the one city, that got back on its feet within a very short amount of time, something like, I don’t know, 12 or 16 hours was the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, which was equally impacted by Hurricane Sandy, but because they have a very good governance model, urban resilience is integrated into virtually every policy aspect of the city of Hoboken.

MIRESCU:

They were one of the first cities to assign a Chief Resilience Officer, outside of the 100 Resilience Cities platform from the Rockefeller Foundation. And this was a case where not only has the city urbanized in a different way, if you walk around Hoboken, you can't find a street corner that doesn't have a stormwater capture system, whether it is a surface green infrastructure system or under their parks. They have these huge, structural void spaces. So, these technologies that are being implemented in cities are indicative of cities being these innovation hubs. It would be really difficult to move the federal government in a way, probably take years to say, we’d like our federal highway system or, some other federal infrastructure to technologically look at new advancements in risk reduction. Whereas a city, especially a city that has a CRO, can more quickly and nimbly say, you know what?

MIRESCU:

I've heard that there's a new structural void space system where you pour the concrete in place, and you create these massive stormwater capture caverns where you can drive ambulance or a fire truck over. I've seen cases of that, and I've been on projects like that. I think to move a little bit away from New York, certainly New Orleans, has made tremendous advancements, not only technologically, but how they share information, how they engage with their communities. I mean, part of this is how do we communicate risk and resilience to the most vulnerable? Dan spoke before about, you know, these neighborhoods in New York City that will probably have to undergo some form of managed retreat. Well, I can tell you those are not people who live in, you know, posh brownstones in the West Village.

MIRESCU:

So, they tend to be people who are living at higher levels of economic and social vulnerability. So, New Orleans is a great example of that, devastated after Hurricane Katrina, and has been, whether it's in the technology of their pumping system, in their green infrastructure, their emergency management capacity, the way they manage water, really an interesting and pretty fascinating case. When it comes to, there are a few cities in the southwest, I want to say Phoenix, Arizona. Some of these cities now have urban heat officers. So, this is really an interesting way at how they're focusing on a particular risk. And so there have been a few of these, small medium sized cities in the southwest that have assigned an urban heat officer to look at cooling stations, but also looking at green infrastructure, tree canopy, really fascinating ways of dealing with a particular risk.

MIRESCU:

And then obviously, you know, Dan brought up this great point that not every tool is going to solve the same problem in a different city. So, what has worked in New Orleans may not work well in Miami? And Miami's an interesting city. Dan spoke about sea level rise. The big question in Miami is how do you raise infrastructure? I think it's one of the recent mayors of Miami was saying, we really need to be technologically advanced in how we engage the built environment. We got to buy time for the city, we got to buy 20, 30 more years of existence here. And all of this, of course, is linked to the return on investment, right? So, resilience is really, at the end of the day, we can spend a lot of time talking about the lofty, ethical discussions of sustainability.

MIRESCU:

And that's all great. We all sign up for that, of course. But really what this boils down to is there is a return on investment and JP Morgan Chase just put out an economic study about the ROI of resilient adaptation actions². And the bandwidth is really, really impressive. I mean, even the most primitive basic investment in risk reduction and resilience – whether it’s in a company, a municipality, a larger organization – at a very minimum, you're looking at a three-to-one return on your investment. That bandwidth goes up the more sophisticated your investments are, and the more sophisticated your resilience practices, that goes up to, I believe, 43-to-one. There are no studies that show that it is a bad investment. So, you know, you sit down with a mayor, or a CEO of a company and they will not tell you that they're okay paying three times, 10 times, 15 times, for an impact, when the data and the practice is showing that this is just good business at this point. Resilience is really nothing more than a value proposition that leads to good business practice.

Clarifying Infrastructure Terminology for Resilience Planning

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

You talked about blue, green and gray infrastructure. Can you help clarify the terminology for our audience?

ZARRILLI:

Yeah, absolutely. The gray infrastructure is usually what people talk about in terms of like the big concrete and steel kind of solutions, the big built, physical infrastructure. Think about your sewer pipes or your flood walls. Whereas the green infrastructure is usually more nature based and using planted areas, bioswales, green roofs to hold and manage water in different ways.

MIRESCU:

Yeah, I would add to that, that they each sort of flow into one another, and they interact and communicate with one another. So, completely agree with Dan on the gray stuff being the big concrete projects, right? Or the big metal piping. On the way that green and blue work is, the green allows us to tackle – using, like, especially in municipalities – whether it's park spaces, trees, any aspect of, like, vegetative growth that can help cool cities, improve tree canopy, also for urban cooling. But also, you know, we're still tackling with post COVID-19, so understanding respiratory health and mental health as part of that green infrastructure is just, you know – yes, bio swales – but it is also designing certain dune spaces or coastal resilience projects that integrate different aspects of where maybe the natural growth has been interrupted by development.

MIRESCU:

And on the blue side, that can mean a couple different things. Generally, it speaks to anything dealing with water. So that's maybe where blue and gray interface, whether it's like in pumping or stormwater management capture systems, things like that. But blue is also, you know, we keep seeing more things about like rewilding certain spaces, urban spaces. Or you keep seeing projects that happen where they, they're opening up historical waterways and they're performing far better in terms of stormwater management than when they were covered over by some sort of pavement or concrete. And there are some really great examples of cities that are moving away from the gray infrastructure and doing more, blue and green. Philadelphia is a city that is, I think been slowly moving away from doing like these big piping projects. And they're doing more stormwater capture and stormwater management systems using more first level surface, green and gray, technologies. So yeah, this can be a little confusing the terminology, but hopefully the other way we described it offers some clarity.

The importance of planning for extreme weather

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

These are all great examples. I'm curious, say for a city that is just getting started to implement solutions in their region, what type of advice would you guys have for them?

ZARRILLI:

I think it definitely starts, Aroo, with getting a clear understanding of your risk, and thinking broadly about what those risks are first. And maybe that might be working with your local universities or finding good models and intelligence to help you understand your risk. That's definitely the first place to start. Then it's about planning for change, knowing that the climate's changing on us and that the risks we face are not static at this point. And one really important tool. Because a lot of times, this conversation around “How do we mitigate risk?” turns into, “Well, I need to build this big new thing. I need to do a project of some sort.” And sometimes the money is there for that project, and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes there's enough, you know, all those questions come up. But the tools that sometimes are more powerful are thinking about, you know, we spend a lot of money as cities on all sorts of things every day. We need to put that money to work to help build more resilience. And usually that turns into a conversation around building codes, zoning codes, and the standards by which we build and where we build, so that everybody who's building or investing in any sort of infrastructure is doing it to higher and better standards that are evidence-based and based on risk.

ZARRILLI:

Clear example of how we did this in New York, when it was clear that the flood maps that come from FEMA were outdated and we were facing thousands of homeowners and multi-family buildings that needed to rebuild after the storm, but the codes didn't really support that. We went in and adopted a higher level of flood risk into our building code, even over and above what was on the FEMA maps. Because we knew that's where it was going, because of sea level rise, because of the under assessment of risk in the first place on some of those maps that we just went and said, “all right, we're going to adopt these.” And we worked with our city council to adopt new flood standards into our building code so that everybody who's rebuilding at that moment is doing it to a better standard. There's a lot of examples on how thinking through building codes, zoning codes and design guidelines can help you institutionalize or mainstream the resilience investments you need to get. And in some cases, you still need to do those other projects. You still need to, you know, build the flood walls or expand your wetland networks and all those things. But it's a really important set of tools to think about the everyday spend and how you spend that better.

MIRESCU:

Let me double click on one or two of Dan's points, here because I find that set of recommendations on what cities should do pretty fascinating. I think the 800-pound gorilla in the room is you need to have a CRO. Like every, every city should just have a CRO or at least some sort of focal point. You know, most cities have a Director of Sustainability. I would like to see that role be something more like a CRO or Director of Climate Risk, or something like that. Cities should have a focal point where all the different departments can come in and get recommendations or try to understand where the risk is. That's from what I see, cities that have CROs actually begin to move the dial on that.

MIRESCU:

I think another really important point is engaging with the private sector. Cities are where housing takes place, economic activity takes place. Cultural activity, transportation, innovation, you name it. You have to understand, how is resilience impacting local businesses? So especially small and medium sized enterprises, on that end. But cities are where we have development and getting the input from real estate developers and design firms and urban planning firms is really key. And there's a great example for that, where a city interfaced with the private sector to get quite a fascinating technological built environment advancement. Washington D.C. several years ago introduced a thing called their soil volume legislation. So, if I understand exactly how that works, anytime they open up a paved surface, what happens is, if it's a developer or if it's a new construction or reconstructions of something within the right of way, they have to guarantee that there's a certain soil volume underneath that paved infrastructure.

MIRESCU:

Why is that important? Because then that helps to understand what's the absorption capacity for stormwater management and for rain events. And this has gone quite a long way, and this is a place where the real estate investors, construction firms and developers got on board with it. And it's something where they realize hey, we need this. It's good for our businesses. This is something that the city inspired, and the private sector got behind it, and it was in the private sector that said, “Hey, we can offer some really interesting structural soil cell technologies that meet the standard for that legislation.” And there's some really interesting implementations of that in D.C.

ZARRILLI:

I think that innovation point, Alex, is so important. Setting good standards and letting the private market fill in with the innovation needed to meet those standards is such a great model. It happens in the energy efficiency space and certainly happens in the resilience space. And cities are the natural place, I think, to really pursue that innovation and risk taking for good solutions.

MIRESCU:

Agreed. Yeah.

Beyond physical hazards: Identifying secondary risks

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Good points. You know, for cities, there's so many different solutions, so many things we can do. And I think Dan, you nailed it, right? First is understand your risk. I'm quite pleased to say, with Zurich Resilience Solutions, we do have a very simple interactive tool that helps municipalities and customers really understand that with our spotlight tool. So, it feels like everywhere you go, everyone's shopping their data. As you say there, there's FEMA maps, there's all these different things and some are more accurate than others, right? What I would say is with Zurich Resilience Solutions, we back it with our money, literally. So, our models are our data exactly the same data that's used to set the capital for Zurich Group. So, we're backing our product with 360 billion in capital, to really put our skin in the game because it's important for our survival to be able to serve our customers and so municipalities could definitely benefit from that. So, you know, we talked a lot about so many different risks. I'm curious, what do you think people are not talking about these days that they should be?

ZARRILLI:

I think so much of the conversation around risk is on the big physical hazards that we experience. The hurricane, the flood, the heat wave, the fire, the sort of the natural and physical impacts. What doesn't get nearly enough conversation, I think, is a sort of second order, impacts of those direct risks. And it's the things around food security and public health that these extreme weather and climate events are going to cause. And would love to hear your thoughts on this too, because one of those key ones, of course, is financial and the way in which natural hazards are going to continue to disrupt financial markets. And you know, being able to get homeowners insurance is necessary to get a mortgage, and there's a tipping point coming when that may be less and less possible, in certain parts of our country. And that's how people are going to really experience climate change when those step functions happen in our financial systems. That's really worrisome, and I don't think it gets nearly enough, conversation in the sort of popular attention around what climate change really means.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

That's a very fair point. So, I'm an actuary by training, so there's a classic actuarial joke. You ask the actuary “What's one plus one,” right? The answer is, what do you want it to be? <laugh> What I mean by that is because there's so many different assumptions. A lot of the modeling we use – just like in extreme weather sometimes – but then we know for sure in extreme weather, one plus one does not equal two. It's probably 5, 7, 10, whatever it is, because everything just exacerbates so much. When you have things colliding with one another, they just amplify so much more. And what does it mean to the financial markets? Things like that.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

You know, we've seen markets move as a result of this. So, when people are not able to move around cities or have economic activity, that has an immediate drag on things. As you said for things driven by legislation, like mortgage requirements, things like that. So that definitely has an impact. I think these are all elements that investors are starting to think through as well. So as part of the miniseries, we actually speak to a CEO to get his point of view on how the investors look at these things, and you'll hear a lot of interesting stuff there, because everyone feels this. Where you have your assets, where you have your people, these are all things you need to think through because any moment of downtime you have; it's a disruption to your customers.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

So, you have reputation risk, and while you're recovering, competitors are getting ahead too. There's a lot of nuance to it. It's not just a whole economy goes down, but those that are prepared have a competitive advantage, and they were winning in the long term. We saw what happened with COVID-19, you know, immediately the stock market crashed. And then of course, we all know rebound is doing really well, but that's very much of the aggregate. If you zoom in more, what you see is the really strong players, they're really winning. The ones that weren't prepared are just getting along. So, it just basically separates the winners and losers so much more.

ZARRILLI:

You've just made the ROI case that Alex described on investing in resilience and preparation. It's such an important way to think about it because those who are more prepared, whether it's cities or companies, are going to win.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Absolutely. No question about it. Dan, Alex, oh, sorry, Alex, go.

MIRESCU:

Ahead. Yeah, one quick additional slant to that is, talking about this – these financial advantages of resilience and what people aren't talking about. I think what people are going to start to talk about soon is: How does the lack of resilience, or the adaptation and pivoting towards resilience, affect the credit rating? I think that this is a really important point. If you're a company and you have a supply chain, or you want to have, you want to build something – bricks and mortar – in a city. If your company has a CRO, and it should, every serious company should have some sort of climate risk officer now, or resilience officer, and you want to make an investment in a city, but you realize that that city does not have a resilience plan – they're not adapting to flooding or heat – and yet a city 50 to 100 miles away is doing that.

MIRESCU:

This is where resilience feeds into the insurability, into the finance ability of how companies, and how cities are positioned. I mentioned that City Hoboken in New Jersey. That's a city who, if you looked at their flooding and you didn't know what they were doing, you would be like, there's no way I'd invest in this. I wouldn't put a business there. I wouldn't want to buy a property there. But you find that their credit rating has been going up. And one of the reasons is because they have clear resilience policies and plans that are integrated across the city, and that allows the city to be able to borrow money at better rates. And that's the same thing that's going to happen with companies. I really like what Dan just said –is, companies and cities, if they are really going full in on understanding their climate risk, whether it's through data or whether it's looking at onsite engineering on their infrastructure or in their portfolio, their physical assets – those groups who are doing that are just going to be better positioned.

MIRESCU:

They're going to be better future proofed and future ready, and their competition, that doesn't do that, they're going to fall by the wayside. And resilience is also a; it's a competitive driver. It will make companies and cities just more investible and better places to do business and to live.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Well said, Alex. Alex, Dan.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

What I've loved about this conversation is you guys have an incredible amount of examples, so it was very helpful. Thank you.

ZARRILLI:

Thanks, Aroo. Thanks, Alex. Always a great conversation.

MIRESCU:

Likewise, great to see you, Dan. Thanks again, Aroo. This was really great.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

And thank you for listening to our Extreme Weather podcast miniseries. If you like the show, leave a comment or review wherever you get your favorite podcast, or drop us a note at media@zurichna.com. This has been the Future of Risk presented by Zurich North America.

1. NYC.gov, “New York City health department releases report on heat-related mortality,” June 30, 2025

2. J.P. Morgan, “Building resilience through climate adaptation,” (2025).