Last month, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) convened 14 companies and five federal agencies for a roundtable on advancing climate resilience in the U.S., convened by C2ES, Resilience Rising, and the Resilience Roadmap project at the Nicholas Institute. This blog post shares insights from the robust conversation on the need to align public and private efforts to build resilience.

A massive heat dome is moving eastward across the United States, endangering human health with an extended stretch of high temperatures. In this news tip, Ashley Ward (director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub) offers commentary and tips for staying safe.

Francis Bouchard, Duke’s first climate leader in residence and longtime insurance executive, wrote in a commentary for Insurance Thought Leadership that a recent workshop could serve as a model for bridging the gap between industry knowledge and community needs. The convening aimed to address at-risk/in-need communities—and those who support them—about the types of climate risk data and analytics they could access and deploy. Duke experts helped facilitate conversation among 40 state and local leaders.

Debt distress, biodiversity loss and climate change are intertwined crises for developing countries. In a Policy Forum for Science, Duke University experts Elizabeth Losos, Alex Pfaff and Stuart Pimm propose four reforms to debt-for-nature swaps to help countries tackle these daunting challenges.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program has announced Lydia Olander, Nicholas Institute program director, as one of more than 150 experts who will write the first-ever National Nature Assessment. The assessment will take stock of nature’s inherent worth, as well as what it provides to culture, health and well-being, jobs and livelihoods, safety and more.

Francis Bouchard, Duke University's inaugural Climate Leader in Residence, writes for Insurance Thought Leadership that insurers have a huge opportunity—and responsibility—to derisk climate change. Bouchard is working with leaders at Duke and the University of Georgia to launch the Center for Innovation in Risk Analysis for Climate Adaptation and Decision-making (CIRCAD), which aims to develop a dynamic platform for leading thinkers in the insurance world to engage directly with top academic researchers to define an action plan for impact.

Investments aimed at building the resilience of climate-vulnerable communities are falling woefully short—and the private sector is almost entirely absent, write Rania A. Al-Mashat (Egypt’s Minister of International Cooperation), Jyotsna Puri (International Fund for Agricultural Development) and Jonathan Phillips (James E. Rogers Energy Access Project at Duke) in a blog post for NextBillion. To help enable this investment, the trio discuss an initiative to measure and monetize climate resilience in an effort to establish a "resilience credit."

The United States' first-ever National Climate Resilience Framework establishes a vision for a climate-resilient nation and guidance for resilience-related activities and investments by the federal government and its partners. In this March 25 webinar, White House officials, state agencies and other key partners discussed implementation of the framework. Part of the National Climate Resilience Framework: From Ideas to Action series.

Business leaders and Biden administration officials will convene with Duke University faculty at a one-day summit next week to create a shared vision for unleashing private capital for climate solutions.

Speakers at “From Billions to Trillions” on Wednesday, Feb. 28, at the Fuqua School of Business will offer insights on how recent legislation will impact and stimulate private green investment. The Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act have provided an influx of federal funding to advance the transition to clean energy and help communities adapt to climate impacts.

World leaders—along with government officials, nongovernmental organizations, researchers and activists—gathered in Dubai for the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference to discuss ways to advance climate action. Experts from the Nicholas Institute attended the conference, released publications or announced initiatives tied to it and/or followed the proceedings closely.