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Resilience Innovation Hub pitches finance solutions, community resilience bonds to task force
Summary
A private sector coalition described plans to harmonize standards and create finance vehicles — including community resilience bonds and a national 'Resilience Community Trust' — to channel private capital into resilience projects in Louisiana and elsewhere.
Richard Sealyne, presenting for the Resilience Innovation Hub and associated nonprofit Future Proofing America, outlined a finance-centered approach to scaling resilience investments and urged a test pilot in Louisiana.
Sealyne described two linked objectives: harmonizing building and resilience standards so private capital and insurers can underwrite risk-reduction at scale, and designing financial instruments to deploy large pools of private capital for resilience projects. He said the group has convened investors, rating-agency representatives and engineering firms to develop community-level finance structures, including what he termed a "community resilience bond" syndicated by public finance firms.
"Capital is not the issue. It is how to organize the capital and deploy the capital to get the results that we all want for resilience," Sealyne said in the presentation. He described the Resilience Innovation Hub's nonprofit arm, Future Proofing America, and said the group has developed data capabilities and a proposed investment vehicle, the Resilience Community Trust, to attract philanthropy, corporate giving and private capital to local resilience projects.
Sealyne warned of widening systemic costs if resilience investments do not scale. He cited cumulative U.S. disaster losses in the transcript: "this country has lost cumulative $4,400,000,000,000 since the mid 19 eighties, '50 percent of that in just the last decade," and urged an accelerated, state-led pilot to demonstrate financeable resilience projects in Louisiana.
Task force members discussed how the state's existing fortified-home programs and HUD-funded projects might be quantified and used to attract private capital. Sealyne said the hub has modeling and data down to fine geographic scales and has identified securitization and public–private bond structures that could be trialed at the state level.
No formal commitment or vote was recorded; participants agreed to follow up with the hub and consider Louisiana as a demonstration site for finance pilots.
