The Sustainability Story: Bill Green – Rethinking Infrastructure Investing for a Changing Climate

Podcast: The Sustainability Story (CFA Institute)
Episode Date: October 7, 2025
Guest: Bill Green, Managing Partner, Climate Adaptive Infrastructure
Host: Deborah Kidd

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Deborah Kidd talks with Bill Green, founder of Climate Adaptive Infrastructure (CAI), about the complex intersection of infrastructure investing and climate change. With decades of experience in sustainable investing and infrastructure, Bill shares insights into how the climate crisis is reshaping both investment strategies and the definition of resilient infrastructure. The conversation covers the unique vulnerabilities of infrastructure assets to climate risk, why these risks are often mispriced, the economic benefits of adaptive approaches, emerging trends, and the need for better disclosure standards.

Defining Infrastructure in a Changing Climate

[03:16]

• Infrastructure Categories: Bill breaks down infrastructure into four main categories:
  1. Energy (all forms)
  2. Water and wastewater
  3. Urban and suburban infrastructure (including transport and data centers)
  4. Food, agriculture, and timber
• CAI’s Focus: Concentrates on the first three of these categories.

“Infrastructure is an all-encompassing category that effectively has four components or four legs to this table... Here at CAI we address the first three.”
— Bill Green [03:16]

The Origin Story: “We Continue to Build Infrastructure for a Planet That No Longer Exists”

[04:19]

• Permanent Nature of Infrastructure: Bill emphasizes that traditional infrastructure—because it is permanent, contracted, and long-dated—faces outsized risks from climate change.
• Misalignment: Much existing and new infrastructure is still sited and designed for outdated climate assumptions.
• Illustrative Example: Assets like toll roads built below sea level are now at major risk from "sunny day flooding" due to sea level rise, but cannot easily be adapted once built.

“If you build a toll road... below sea level along the coast, and you now have 100 days of sunny day flooding, you can't move that road. That toll road doesn't become an airport or a solar farm. It is what it is.”
— Bill Green [05:25]

Rethinking Risk: The “Triple Threat” Approach

[10:03]

• CAI’s Additional Climate Screen: Beyond traditional metrics like credit or leverage, CAI applies special climate screens:
  • Physical Risk: Damage from extreme weather events (floods, hail, fires, etc.)
  • Regulatory Risk: Risks arising from current laws (wetlands, habitat protection)
  • Political Risk: Anticipating regulatory or policy changes not yet enacted
• All Three are Critical: Initially, investors focused just on physical risks, but focus shifts over time as regulatory and political contexts evolve.

“We call it the triple threat risk... physical, regulatory, and political risk.”
— Bill Green [10:07]

“The three risks are always present and must always be considered. But in the moment, one seems more pressing than the other.”
— Bill Green [11:23]

Enhancing Resilience: Practical Examples

[07:19]

• More Than Traditional vs New Builds: The key is in enhanced due diligence—not changing the asset but upgrading risk reviews.
  • Case in Point: Solar farms now face larger, more destructive hail due to climate change. A climate-adaptive approach includes forecasting storms and moving solar panels vertically to minimize damage.
• Goal: Make traditional infrastructure more resilient, not just “greenwashed.”

“It's the same solar farm. We've just asked a set of questions that goes beyond what may heretofore have been the norm for due diligence and screening.”
— Bill Green [08:59]

The Economics of Climate Adaptive Infrastructure

[13:00]

• Returns First: CAI’s approach is not concessionary. The focus is maximizing returns by reducing risk and capitalizing on inevitable climate transitions.
• Inevitabilities Trump Rhetoric: Regardless of political shifts, certain climate trends—rising temperatures, increased drought—are mathematically inevitable and have direct investment implications.

“Nothing that we do at CAI is concessionary. We never ask or consider a trade-off between doing well and doing good.”
— Bill Green [13:19]

“The inevitabilities of the climate crisis are our inevitabilities... As parents or grandparents, we may not like the inevitabilities... but they are nevertheless inevitabilities.”
— Bill Green [13:56]

Emerging Priorities & Trends

[16:34]

• Top Opportunities Today:
  1. Water Infrastructure as a Service: Many industries (semiconductors, data centers) depend on access to highly treated water but aren’t water specialists; CAI owns the treatment systems and supplies water as a service.
  2. Data Centers & Energy Siting: The explosion in data means data centers are now sited where renewable electricity is abundant (e.g., Texas) rather than just near population hubs, eliminating some transmission constraints.
• Trend: Infrastructure loads will increasingly shift toward sources of generation, not just points of demand.

“So the whole idea of moving load, be it data load, be it manufacturing load to generation, is going to be another theme that we think is going to be quite critical.”
— Bill Green [19:51]

The Challenge of Disclosures and Standards

[22:09]

• Dizzying Standards: There are numerous, often inconsistent, reporting standards (EU taxonomy/SFDR, PRI, etc.), and clients may demand conformance to different ones.
• Complexity in Measurement: Even questions that sound simple—like, “How much CO₂ does your solar plant remove?”—can be almost impossible to answer accurately due to shifting energy sources on the grid.
• What’s Needed: More logical, answerable, and comparable metrics to help investors make sound decisions.

“What seems like an honest, but perhaps simplified question... is really an almost unanswerable question.”
— Bill Green [24:10]

Tone of Optimism Amid Challenge

[25:49]

• Optimism Grounded in Action: Investing in adaptation and mitigation offers tangible, rewarding ways to address climate realities.
• Navigating “Split-Screen Reality”: The broader information landscape may be confusing or discouraging, but investment anchored in climate facts is both logical and hopeful.

“The knowledge of these inevitabilities is... not always pleasant... but when you think about taking action and making investments in the face of these known inevitabilities, it's a lot more rewarding than you might think.”
— Bill Green [25:53]

Notable Quotes:

• “We continue to build infrastructure for a planet that no longer exists.” — Bill Green [03:56]
• “All three of these risk categories matter equally. So there are many, many ways that we can also address the risks of the climate crisis, but make investments that are not only sustainable, but... quite profitable at the same time.” — Bill Green [11:43]
• “The inevitabilities are what we as allocators, investors and other members of CFA have to focus on. Because that's like the math on the page. Those are the unchanging numbers.” — Bill Green [15:40]
• “If you anchor into the inevitabilities of the work that we're doing... this is addressing inevitabilities, earning investors the kinds of returns that they would like, and at the same time really sort of helping us get out of bed day after day to continue to do this work.” — Bill Green [26:24]

Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic | |---------------|---------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:05 | Bill’s personal sustainability journey | | 03:16 | What infrastructure means at CAI | | 04:19 | “We continue to build infrastructure for a planet that no longer exists”—explained | | 07:19 | Climate-adaptive investment approach | | 10:03 | The “triple threat” of physical, regulatory, political risk | | 13:00 | Economics and inevitabilities of climate risk | | 16:34 | Trends: water infrastructure, data center siting | | 22:09 | Challenges with disclosures and standards | | 25:49 | Optimism and the case for action |

Summary

Bill Green’s perspective brings home the critical need to reframe infrastructure investment by incorporating rigorous, climate-forward analysis. He makes a compelling case—with data, stories, and optimism—for balancing profit and sustainability, insisting that climate resiliency is not just good stewardship, but also good business. For asset owners and investors navigating an uncertain future, integrating climate risks may be the difference between stranded assets and long-term opportunity.