About The Host

Financial Climate podcast with Alex Roth

Alex Roth is passionate about applying his professional skills in finance, analysis, and strategy to advance climate solutions.

He currently serves as a Branch Chief at FEMA, supporting implementation of billions of dollars in federal funding to enhance resilience. Previously, he worked for ten years in various financial roles for Bonneville Power, a carbon-free wholesale power utility which owns and operates most of the Pacific Northwest’s power grid.

Earlier in his career, he analyzed and managed the financing of large infrastructure projects at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Washington, DC and served in several policy roles, including as a legislative staff member in the U.S. Senate.

Alex holds JD and MBA degrees from the University of Oregon and a BA in Economics from Colby College.

The podcast is produced in his personal capacity. Views expressed here are his own; guests’ views are theirs.

It’s widely known that simple measures taken before climate fueled disasters can prevent human suffering and save enormously on the cost of rebuilding. But human nature is that people procrastinate—sometimes until it’s too late. Another problem is cost. Even if making buildings or infrastructure resilient saves money in the long term, it can be expensive in the near term.

Gina Hardy is the CEO of two state-chartered nonprofit insurance companies in North Carolina. Combined, they insure hundreds of billions of dollars in property owned by more than half a million policyholders. Her companies—like many others—use catastrophe bonds, or cat bonds, to spread the risk of its insurance policies to the broader financial markets. But in the case of the companies Gina leads, the cat bonds can also make available funds that ultimately allow the payment of up to $10,000 each to insured homeowners if they install a roof specially reinforced to withstand the strong storms and high winds that increasingly threaten houses in North Carolina.

I sat down with Gina to understand how an innovatively-structured catastrophe bond could allow an insurance company to pay so much for resilience without a government subsidy. I wanted to learn how financial provisions in bond transactions in the hundreds of millions of dollars could pay to strengthen homes of individual families. And I wanted to know what Gina and her colleagues learned about the practical challenges of designing and implementing a first of its kind program like this one.

Resources referenced in this episode:

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Ep. 28: Funding climate adaptation through resilience bonds, with North Carolina insurance CEO Gina Hardy

May 14, 2026

Alex Roth

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Ep: 27: How military conflict contributes to climate change, with Ellie Kinney of the Conflict and Environment Observatory

February 20, 2026

Alex Roth

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