Building the Systems Behind California’s Climate Investments
Co-Authors:
Lily Bui, PhD, Philanthropy CA
Taylor Carnevale & Nuin-Tara Key, CA FWD
Sam Carter, Laura Barron, & Anna Friedman, Resilient Cities Catalyst
Jonathan Parfrey, Lia Cohen, & Samantha Nuno, Climate Resolve
Ron Milam, SmartGrowth CA
California Forward (CA FWD), Climate Resolve, Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC), Smart Growth California, and Philanthropy California convened a two-part statewide series in summer 2026 with representatives from philanthropy and other strategic partners to examine what it takes to move community-driven climate resilience projects from planning into implementation. The resulting report, Pipelines to Portfolios: Unlocking and Scaling Climate Capital, brings together lessons from those discussions. This blog summarizes key insights from the summer series and explores how philanthropy and cross-sector partners can build project pipelines, collaborative infrastructure, and financing strategies needed to turn California’s climate resilience priorities into community-driven projects ready for implementation and scale.
California’s climate resilience challenge is increasingly one of capital absorption, not simply capital availability. Before a project can protect a neighborhood from flooding or provide a refuge from extreme heat, several pieces must come together. Depending on the project, a team may need an agreement to use a site, designs and cost estimates, environmental review, commitments from partner organizations, and a clear understanding of who will build, own, and operate what gets built. Without that preparation, communities can have urgent needs and may even have identified available funding–but may lack a project ready to put those dollars to work.
CA FWD’s review of 31 state adaptation and resilience programs points to why funding continuity is difficult. Sixty-eight percent of these programs focus on implementation, while support for planning and capacity building is less consistent. The average program lasts just over two funding cycles, and more than a third are one-time or episodic. On the other hand, communities may develop projects over several years while relying on programs that support only one stage of that work.
Public agencies reasonably expect applicants to show that a project can be delivered and responsibly managed. But producing that evidence takes time and money. Securing site control, completing technical studies, updating designs and cost estimates, coordinating partners, and demonstrating financial capacity are all part of project readiness. Matching requirements and reimbursement-based grants can shift those costs onto applicants before construction begins, making it prohibitively difficult for community-based organizations with limited staff and cash on hand.
Readiness support is most useful when it responds to the next barrier a project must clear. One project may need to secure site control or update cost estimates; another may need technical assistance to resolve a permitting or operating issue. Support at that stage can give a project a clearer path to the grant, loan, or combination of capital that fits its needs. Readiness also changes over time. A site agreement may expire before funding becomes available. Rising construction costs may require a revised budget or design. A change in partners may require a new operating arrangement. Keeping a project viable, therefore, requires ongoing work to update technical information, revisit responsibilities, and respond to changing requirements.
Pipelines to Portfolios: A Summer Roundtable Series
This summer, CA FWD, Resilient Cities Catalyst, Climate Resolve, Philanthropy CA, and SmartGrowth CA co-hosted two statewide conversations highlighting an important opportunity for philanthropy and other catalytic investors. This series was designed as an onramp to the California Economic Summit and Resilient CA Summit in October 2026, where partners convened in-person to continue building collaborative infrastructure for climate investments. The convenings brought together philanthropic partners with people working in project development, public finance, community partnerships, and implementation, and focused on the years that can pass between initially identifying a community need and implementation, during which costs, regulations, public priorities, and community needs can shift.
A synthesis report of these two convenings points to two complementary ways of organizing resilience investment. One builds portfolios from individual projects, allowing funding and technical assistance to be assembled and delivered at scale even when projects address different needs or occur in different places. The other explores how a community can establish a publicly authorized investment structure that can receive and deploy capital, coordinate revenue, prioritize projects, and administer a coherent investment strategy over time. The report’s central point is that support must remain responsive to shifting needs and priorities of communities, organizations, capital providers, and the policy landscape.
Illustrative Examples
Several ongoing demonstration initiatives across California illustrate these two complementary approaches to resilience investment. Speakers representing these initiatives were invited to share their lessons learned during the roundtable discussions.
The California Resilience Implementation Accelerator, LA28 Resilience Champions Fund, and Central Coast Community Resilience Hubs Accelerator illustrate the portfolio approach. They bring multiple community projects together around shared resilience priorities, while recognizing that projects may be at different stages and need different forms of support. The portfolio model, demonstrated by these three initiatives, pairs seed funding with tailored technical assistance for a defined next step. By bundling various projects into cohesive portfolios, these efforts can reveal common barriers, coordinate expertise and relationships, and connect projects with different routes to implementation.
Making a portfolio approach work requires durable coordinating capacity. Nonprofit intermediaries and regional partners need resources to maintain relationships with project teams, retain knowledge of community priorities, identify barriers shared across projects, organize technical assistance, and connect teams with potential funders. This capacity is part of the infrastructure of a project pipeline. Without continuity, projects may have to rebuild relationships and funding strategies each time a new opportunity opens.
The second approach solves for the ever-present dilemma of “no one’s job, everyone’s responsibility” when it comes to adaptation and resilience. It examines whether a place-based public structure could integrate several functions into a shared framework: responsibility for implementation, a geography that reflects where risks and benefits occur, decision-making authority, and a revenue strategy. Today, these functions are often distributed across agencies, jurisdictions, and funding programs. Local agencies may understand and coordinate resilience needs without controlling revenue aligned with the geography or beneficiaries of the work. Existing programs may support planning, predevelopment, or maintenance while implementation depends on fragmented grants and annual budget cycles.
Through the Resilience District Incubator, communities examine whether a district or similar structure could bring project priorities, geography, decision-making, and revenue into a shared framework. They assess potential revenue sources, governance arrangements, and the responsibilities such a structure would need to carry, including project coordination and, where appropriate, operations and maintenance. If a district proves appropriate and is established, it could provide a community with a consistent way to set priorities, align resources, and sustain implementation beyond individual grants. This is a different function from project-level support: it concerns how a community will organize decisions and resources across projects and over time.
Pacific Community Ventures, a community development financial institution, works with borrowers to build the capacity and deal structures needed to translate climate-related needs of small businesses and communities into investable opportunities. PCV’s model illustrates how philanthropic and public capital can be used strategically to make financing more accessible rather than replacing financing altogether. Through its catalytic support for FireSat, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation helped move a new wildfire detection technology from concept toward implementation while bringing together philanthropies, government, commercial partners, firefighters, scientists, and other end users around a shared vision for more proactive wildfire resilience.
These illustrative examples demonstrate how philanthropy can support a larger systems-level vision while building the ecosystem needed to make innovation useful at scale.
Philanthropy’s Catalytic Role in the Ecosystem
Both reflections from representatives of these demonstration projects and a candid roundtable discussion among participants helped clarify philanthropy’s role. Philanthropic support can fund work that public programs and traditional finance often leave uncovered, including predevelopment, technical assistance, portfolio coordination, shared learning, and early exploration of governance and revenue options. Those investments can help projects reach appropriate public funding or financing and help communities test structures that could sustain implementation. Philanthropy is not expected to become the permanent source of capital. Some costs will require grants; others may be covered by loans or other financing where repayment is feasible. The task is to match capital to the project’s needs and economics. The next frontier for philanthropy is not necessarily to deploy more in grants but to gain greater fluency about different systems of capital and how they can be woven together, as well as the policies, practices, and partnerships that would allow all players to participate confidently.
Our synthesis report invites cross-sector partners in philanthropy, government, financial institutions, intermediaries, and communities to learn together where projects stall and what support is missing. For funders and program designers, that means looking beyond the project award itself to the people, coordination, and public structures that allow projects to remain viable. We invite readers to read Pipelines to Portfolios: Unlocking and Scaling Climate Capital and consider what their institutions can fund, coordinate, or sustain.