Securing growth in a resource-constrained world: 6 takeaways from our Climate Week NYC panel

In energy, location is everything. Every site sits on several layers, including natural resources, physical infrastructure, policy, and economics, and sometimes even one street can change the entire business case. Ron recalled a site decision at Amazon where leasing the building across the street would have put the company in a different utility territory, with different rates, rebates, and clean energy options. 

2. Physical risk cannot be an average

Joanna argued that environmental risk doesn't behave the way portfolio theory expects. Spreading it around doesn't make it smaller – physical hazards compound and escalate across the system.

Getting financial institutions to use geospatial data has been the main barrier. Ben believes that is changing fast. AI agents that specialize in reading geospatial information are making that data easier to work with, and an idea conceptualized years ago is now "going to scale incredibly rapidly."

(At Earth Finance, we see AI as an accelerant, not the bridge itself. Today's models and agents can speed up analysis and synthesis, but linking physical and transition risk to financial modeling still depends on scientific rigor, financial economics, and human judgment. That combination is what turns geospatial data into an investment decision. Read more on our view of AI and the next chapter of Spatial Finance.)

4. The past no longer predicts the future

Financial markets largely assume the past predicts the future. Joanna noted that planetary science has spent decades modeling a world where that assumption fails. She gave an example of where physical and transition risk meet – advanced AI chips. Most are made in Taiwan, in fabrication plants that use enormous amounts of water. In 2021, a historic drought pushed reservoirs to critically low levels, and the plants had to truck in water to keep production going.

The example brings together an undiversified supply chain, a geopolitically sensitive region, and exposure to a single season of drought, all underpinning a technology buildout that is attracting unprecedented investment.

5. Risk management won't build the systems we need

Lisa argued that environmental risk frameworks and disclosure regimes have confused managing risk with building resilient systems.

A risk disclosure framework can at best tell an organization what its risks are so it can manage them. Lisa said these frameworks were promoted as a way to reshape systems, but instead they have produced a lot of data that is "neither actually useful…nor even remotely capable of building the systems to manage it."

There is also a practical limit. The rational response to higher risk is to invest less in vulnerable places, which are often where investment is needed most. Ben added that disclosure tells you "what management thinks about a particular set of issues at a given point of time." That frustration is part of what pushed his team toward encouraging the adoption of asset-level geospatial data.

The takeaway from Lisa's (self-described) controversial point of view is that spatial data is valuable for assessing risk to individual assets, and is even more valuable for planning the systems we need to build.

6. The scramble for power, land, and water is already here

Ron brought it back to the real economy with examples from the data center race:

• Land: Data center developers are outbidding other buyers by multiples. At Noria Energy, Ron's team lost a Minnesota solar site after bidding six figures against a seven-figure data center offer.
• Power: PJM capacity auction prices rose several-fold in a single year.
• Water: Not every facility uses closed-loop cooling, and much of the water footprint is hidden upstream in energy generation and chip manufacturing.

Lisa noted that the same geospatial data a hyperscaler uses to find land, water, and power could also inform how those finite resources are allocated across all users, beyond any single entity.

Understanding the true cost of doing business

Earth Finance CEO Garrett Kephart closed the event with a simple point. Financial planning has long assumed water and power will be available when needed, at a price companies can pay. That assumption is breaking down.