The physical and financial effects of climate change on housing are simultaneously reshaping financial markets and urban policy and practice. In this roundtable discussion, Savannah Cox interviews five experts working on housing, climate adaptation, and finance in a wide range of urban contexts: Zac Taylor, Isabelle Anguelovski, Alex Fella, Zachary Lamb, and Linda Shi. Participants illuminate how these domains collide in multiple and complex ways in the frontline communities where they do research and capacity-building. Physical climate risks like flooding or heat stress, housing characteristics like tenure, property and land regimes, as well as public and market-led planning and finance approaches collectively shape local housing and adaptation trajectories. This complexity calls for more than simply scaling up the volumes of capital to address housing adaptation finance “gaps” in citie—as commonly advocated for by urban climate policymakers. Even well intentioned and proactive investment approaches can lead to unequal outcomes like climate gentrification. Urban policymakers, financial institutions, civic groups, and other stakeholders must build local capacity to understand and address these dynamics. Climate risk assessment tools, technical support, ownership structures, and other interventions offer potential routes to foster agency and mobilize resources to balance housing and climate goals in cities.

Financial agendas centering on the global fight against climate change have increasingly turned to cities and urban re/development projects as ideal candidates for supposedly ‘future proof’ investment. In the last decade, research has witnessed the development of policy programs, risk assessments, and project pipelines, amongst other efforts to materialize this agenda in the city. Drawing on critical urban geographies of what is loosely known as ‘climate finance’, this Special Feature, ‘Decentering Urban Climate Finance’, proposes to expand and provincialize these dominant agendas. The five contributions in this Special Feature employ the notion of decentering in four distinct ways: by putting a broader range of theoretical lenses to use and rereading the workings of climate finance through them; by highlighting the modes of omission through which dominant understandings of climate finance narrow its operations to a limited set of solutions, approaches, places, and imaginaries; by turning a view onto under-examined sites of finance and climate adaptation; and by imagining alternative transformative imaginaries of urban climate finance.

This special issue explores the centrality of finance, risk rating, and valuation in driving urban adaptation pathways and outcomes. The articles in this issue do so through a vast set of sites. These include adaptation efforts underway in high- and low-income cities in Mexico, Portugal, India, the United States, and Taiwan, as well as novel climate risk governance experiments in large and small cities in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. The articles also look beyond the boundaries of the city and explore the risk rating and valuation practices of increasingly climate-exposed insurance companies and water utilities in Australia and the United Kingdom. All the articles trace the complex and consequential interplay of risk, finance, and adaptation in cities with a specific goal in mind: to consider how urban policies, financing, and planning measures can be repurposed to advance equitable, transformative adaptation.

Background: Real estate, infrastructure, and related urban systems are increasingly exposed to the physical impacts of climate change, threatening both their durability and societal stability. Today the understanding of urban climate risks and their management is emerging but incomplete, highlighting the need for collaborative, integrated, and transparent approaches. However, existing collaborative approaches do not often lead to practical and actionable solutions, exposing a gap in expertise on how to co-create truly integrative approaches in a landscape of fragmented knowledge. Method: This article introduces an integrated approach to transdisciplinary knowledge production on urban climate risk management, using the case of the Red&Blue programme (Real Estate Development and Building in Low Urban Environments). This research-intensive knowledge programme in the low-lying Dutch urban delta was co-created by diverse disciplinary researchers and cross-sectoral practitioners, including financial institutions. Here, the authors reflect on three key “how” questions concerning programme co-creation with stakeholders, the organization of the collaboration process, and capacity development for reflection on insights in transdisciplinary cooperation. Results: Preliminary findings over the last two-and-a-half years of the programme highlight key challenges in transdisciplinary cooperation. To address them, the authors stress the need for creating safe and open spaces for stakeholder dialogue, where diverse cooperation strategies help build shared vocabularies, enabling stakeholders to jointly define, identify, and analyze multidimensional climate risk issues and potential adaptation solutions. Conclusion: The integrated approach presented in this article offers a preliminary model and means to build integrated knowledge on climate risk management and related sustainability transitions in the built environment.

Understandings of climate finance are in flux today in politically urgent ways, posing timely questions for critical urban scholarship and practice. The term climate finance came prominently into use as a point of contention in United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) debates over the last decade. It was employed in calls upon wealthy countries to dedicate funding to support climate change responses in the Global South—recognizing that many countries who have contributed least to the climate crisis now stand to suffer most from its impacts. Climate finance is also a growing priority for multilateral and bilateral development funders. However, governmental and multilateral channels of climate finance have persistently failed to meet pledged and called-for commitments, let alone address the more significant climate financing gap facing communities worldwide, or the even higher tally suggested by more transformative understandings of climate/ecological debt and reparations. Growing critical scholarship suggests that a major outcome of—and underlying factor in—this political impasse has been an increase in the power of private financial institutions to set the terms of new climate-related investment, and to define narratives of (and capacity for) financing responses in their favor. [...]

An actuarial tool first widely used by property re/insurers plays an increasingly important role in shaping the governance of urban futures: the catastrophe risk model. “Cat models” bring together a wide array of data on natural hazards (i.e. hurricane winds, floods), building construction and other spatial features, and financial risk. The actuarial synthesis provided by cat models informs how re/insurers determine the price, terms, and availability of insurance policies, and how they make internal financial decisions to meet their own profitability goals and solvency requirements from regulators. Following a series of expensive disasters in the 1990s, cat models have become an essential element of re/insurance market-making and expansion worldwide, but also a focal point of critique and transformation. In recent years, a growing variety of institutional actors have taken up the use of cat models to facilitate new and speculative practices of climate risk management in the built environment, such as credit rating agencies, governments, and institutional real estate investors. Through cat models, cities are rendered as portfolios of property value-at-risk to be secured through bundles of risk mitigation interventions: a well-placed neighborhood flood defense, benefit-cost-optimized asset “hardening” retrofits, new insurance techniques, or sharpened real-estate finance investment underwriting terms. In this context, cat models represent an important tool within an emergent paradigm of what may be called “property value-at-risk urbanism”—an orientation of urban climate resilience intervention towards measures that preserve existing financial and fiscal relations within the built environment against the prospects of climate devaluation and dislocation.

Climate risk labelling has emerged as a potential strategy for managing physical climate risks in the Dutch real estate sector, particularly following substantial flooding in the Limburg region in 2021. This study examines the concept of, implementation challenges, and implications of residential climate risk labels in the Netherlands through expert interviews with researchers and practitioners in urban governance, flood risk management, and real estate economics. The research explores how risk labels could influence climate adaptation, market dynamics, and equity concerns. Findings reveal methodological challenges in developing standardized and accurate labels, tensions between potential climate label user groups, and potential distributional effects on housing affordability. The study identifies key considerations for implementation: ensuring quality and transparency of risk information, clarifying adaptation action perspectives for homeowners, addressing scale mismatches between building-level and area-level risks, and embedding labels within broader climate adaptation policies. This research contributes to understanding how climate risk information provision mechanisms operate in practice and their implications for urban practitioners.

Every year, more people across the United States experience climate disasters, forcing them to leave their homes, lose their belongings, and be separated from jobs and family. Meanwhile, home insurance markets are in a mounting crisis– and leaving people across the country behind. Media and policy makers are attuned to this crisis, but most are not offering analysis and solutions that address the core issue: how we ensure safe, accessible, and affordable housing in a time of increasing climate change-driven disasters.

Our new research outlines overlaps in insurance prices, housing costs, climate risk, and socioeconomic factors at national and state levels; provides critical analysis of prevailing industry narratives; offers a comprehensive policy proposal that aims to provide protections for homeowners and renters, meet the moment of a rapidly changing climate, and contribute to climate solutions rather than to the climate crisis.

Our analysis dives into case studies in California, Florida, and Minnesota, yet finds that no state is truly risk free in a climate-changed future.

Florida’s property insurance market is in crisis. Many of the Sunshine State’s insurers are raising rates or pulling out of communities, zip code by zip code. The average Florida homeowners insurance premium rose to nearly $11,000 in 2023, with notably higher rates in coastal South Florida cities—the costliest in the nation. This brewing insurance affordability crisis is particularly acute for Florida’s half-million housing cost-burdened households with mortgages, who must continue to purchase insurance or face default on their mortgage. That’s because mortgage lenders require borrowers to maintain insurance—a measure designed to protect the banking system, but which also places many frontline households in a serious affordability bind.

The expansion of Residential Real Estate Investment Trusts (R-REITs) represents an important frontier in the financialization of housing and cities. This paper advances the literature on institutional real estate investment and corporate landlordism by analyzing how and where the 15 largest, publicly-listed R-REITS and REIT-like funds in Germany and the US are growing today. First, we introduce the metaphor of the feeding machine to characterize how key actors like the state, private equity, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provide R-REITs with the properties, capital, and imperative to grow. Second, we find four geographical expansion strategies at work: (1) investment beyond mainstream asset classes: from multi-family apartments and single-family rentals to student flats, care homes, and mobile home and recreational vehicle sites, (2) the concentration and consolidation of ownership, through mergers and acquisitions and focused investment in select markets, (3) acquisition across national borders, and (4) institution-led new construction. Despite crucial nuances in individual R-REIT strategies and the housing systems of each country, our comparative analysis reveals shared trajectories and rationalities of expansion. We posit that ETFs and the indexes through which they allocate investment increasingly shape the restless urban landscape of R-REIT growth, pumping liquidity into spatially fixed assets.

Home insurance markets in the United States are experiencing a mounting crisis. Worsening climate disasters like more intense hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms are making multi-billion-dollar payouts an annual occurrence, hitting a broad range of US states. Insurance protections are shrinking and becoming increasingly unaffordable, while private insurers are raising rates or pulling out of some markets entirely. Homeowners left behind face dilemmas like potential mortgage defaults—personal risks which may spiral into broader property market collapses. Meanwhile, renters and other households confront future uncertainties with even more limited protections. How can we more fully understand this mounting housing crisis, and what is to be done about it?

In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential ‘climate-proofing,’ retrofitting efforts that bring climate finance ‘home’ to the building level. Building on the concept of ‘real property supremacy,’ we demonstrate how resourcing climate response is limited by the privileging of real property in the structure and distribution of low-carbon financial tools and incentives. We argue that this privileging reproduces hierarchies of protection for some, while exacerbating existing social inequalities, exclusions, and predations for others—ultimately, yielding greater control over climate futures to those with asymmetrical power over real property. This structurally unequal treatment risks locking-in extant social hierarchies embedded in US real property relationships instead of seizing opportunities to transform them via the historic urban investments required for climate change.

Klimaatverandering zorgt tal van nieuwe risico’s voor gebouwen en infrastructuur. Het in kaart brengen van deze klimaatrisico’s is in volle gang, maar de betrouwbaarheid van de beoordelingen die hieruit volgen laat te wensen over en dit maakt de handelingsbasis beperkt. Dat concludeerden de experts die deelnamen aan de eerste Focal Point Meeting van het Red&Blue-programma over klimaatadaptatie.

Credit rating agencies like Moody's have amassed vast datasets about scale and distribution of climate risk. The proprietary "expertise" derived from this data increasingly guides how both governments and financial institutions respond to the crisis.

As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. This paper’s multi-scalar intervention draws on financial “following” methods to explore how climate risks are being experienced and governed at multiple illustrative moments of U.S. mortgage finance: (1) working households at the front line of urban climate impacts, (2) mortgage professionals brokering loans to them, (3) government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) negotiating incoming federal climate risk disclosure requirements, and (4) capital markets off-taking GSE risks through financial derivatives like credit risk transfers. Emerging concerns include ruptures between household risks and financial system-preserving responses and new dangers of “climate redlining.”.

 Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been around since 1960 but have only become major players in housing markets in the last twenty years. The current and ongoing wave of residential REIT (R-REIT) expansion has attracted significant scholarly and broader public interest. This article examines how real estate, finance, and the state are configured in relation to each other through R-REITs. While much of the housing financialization literature has focused on the real estate/state axis of this relationship, we explore the underexamined connections between the real estate/finance axis and the finance/state axis of the real estate–finance–state triangle. We analyze the financial accounts of the world’s fifteen largest publicly traded R-REITs and R-REIT–like funds in the two largest markets: the United States and Germany. Our findings demonstrate how the ownership of R-REIT stock is remarkably homogeneous: the largest shareholders in each of the studied R-REITs are the three largest index exchange-traded funds, which are heavily backed by pension fund capital. For these investors, it is important that R-REITs provide a healthy return on investment at the lowest possible risk. The investors require the state, in its various guises, to guarantee attractive risk-adjusted returns on R-REITs investments. We identify six dimensions of state de-risking in this context, deepening our understanding of the role of the state in housing financialization. It is the state that creates the trust in real estate investment trusts, and it thus is what generates the investment in real estate investment trusts.

Reflecting on the limits of the sovereign-state centricity of mainstream contemporary climate action, Peter Taylor calls for new forms of regional geographical analysis and intervention. What might these aims and ambitions look and feel like for geographers? With this commentary, I take up Taylor's propositions through personal reflection on the work of “doing regional geography” in this current juncture of transnational climate action and transformation. I engage with the analytical challenges associated with regional climate research today – in my case, by way of financialized climate governance puzzles in Florida and the Netherlands. I also discuss how deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to knowledge production enliven my regional geographical engagement, but also generate new personal and disciplinary dilemmas. With this brief note, I hope to reinforce continued reflection on how geographers might take up – or inhabit – timely calls for regional analysis and intervention in climate-changing regions.

How will climate change and its governance redraw maps of financial flows across the world, and with what implications for whom? Can the resources needed for decarbonization and adaptation to already‐arriving climate impacts be mustered at the scale and rate needed to mitigate socioecological harms and planetary destabilizations? Can they be deployed in a way that does not exacerbate pre‐existing risks and injustices, themselves often bound up in legacies of financialized extraction? Such questions, empirical and normatively inflected, are drawing growing attention from geographers. Increasingly, this questioning is coalescing around an influential, though still definitionally unsettled term and concept: climate finance.

Meebewegen met het water, in de meest extreme vorm door adaptieve migratie, werpt vanuit economisch-geografisch perspectief een aantal belangrijke vragen op met betrekking tot agglomeratievoordelen, plaatsgebonden beleid en mobiliteit. Eerder onderzoek naar grootschalige verplaatsingen van productie en mensen (migratie) tonen aan dat welvaarts- en welzijnsverliezen aanzienlijk zijn, dat mitigatiestrategieën interregionale afstemming behoeven die moeilijk is vorm te geven, en dat steden en regio’s als groeimotoren van de economie niet 1-2-3 met plaatsgebonden beleid zijn te behouden of verplaatsen. Het nadenken over deze processen en factoren dient nu te beginnen, zodat we later niet achter de feiten aanlopen. Het doel van deze notitie is om de regionaal-economische ordeningsprincipes te duiden die samenhangen met de adaptatiestrategie ‘Meebewegen’, en in het bijzonder het meest extreme scenario van adaptieve migratie. Meebewegen is een scenario waarbij Nederland wordt geconfronteerd met 2 tot 5 meter zeespiegelstijging in de periode 2100 tot 2200 en inwoners en bedrijven zich aanpassen aan het water. Overstromingen kennen dan een grotere waarschijnlijkheid, hebben een groter impact, keren sneller terug of zijn onomkeerbaar. In (kwetsbare) delen van Nederland is daarbij sprake van terugtrekking in de vorm van adaptieve migratie. Meebewegen met water heeft economische consequenties, maar deze consequenties zijn in belangrijke mate afhankelijk van het moment waarop aanpassingen urgent worden. [...]