AI for Climate Resilient Food Systems with ClimateAi’s Himanshu Gupta
ClimateAi co-founder and CEO Himanshu Gupta explains how his
company uses machine learning to forecast extreme weather and help businesses adapt to climate volatility. Himanshu shares his journey from rural India to co-founding ClimateAi while he was an MBA student. He describes how ClimateAi's "biophysics-driven AI" combines limited weather and crop yield data to inform procurement, logistics, and planting decisions for a quarter of the top 200 food and beverage companies. He also shares examples of government partnerships focused on food security and national supply chain resilience and offers insight on the future of adaptation technologies and enterprise AI. Finally, Himanshu gives advice to those looking to work at the intersection of AI and resilience in the food and agriculture industry.
This episode is a part of our series on Climate Resilience, which also features Sarah Russell, Managing Director at Google X; Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen; and Alex Berkowitz, CEO of Coastal Protection Services. Visit climaterising.org to explore the entire series!
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Designing for Resilience: with Alex Berkowitz of Coastal Protection Services
This episode is another in our series on Climate Resilience featuring
Alex Berkowitz, Founder and CEO of Coastal Protection Solutions (CPS), a
startup developing nearshore infrastructure that reduces wave energy and enhances climate resilience. Alex shares how her personal experience with Hurricane Sandy in her hometown of Rockaway Beach led to the creation of the Wave Breaker—an innovative floating barrier designed to protect coastal communities from storm surge and erosion.
She explains how CPS integrates landscape design, marine engineering, and microgrid energy into its solution, and how it differs from traditional seawalls or breakwaters. Alex also discusses navigating public policy, permitting, and insurance incentives, and finally, Alex shares her career advice for those who are interested in climate resilience.
Host and Guest
Host: Mike Toffel, Professor, Harvard Business School (LinkedIn)
Guest: Alex Berkowitz, Founder
& CEO, Coastal Protection Solutions (LinkedIn)
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Investing in Climate Resilience and Poverty Alleviation: Acumen Founder & CEO Jacqueline Novogratz
In this Climate Rising episode in our series on climate resilience, Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder and CEO of Acumen shares how impact investing is agriculture is helping smallholder farmers build climate resilience. Jacqueline shares insights from two decades of investing in poverty alleviation that includes climate resilience and adaptation social enterprises engaging in agriculture and off-grid solar.
She explains how Acumen uses blended capital, including philanthropic first-loss investments and commercial impact funding, to scale business models in underdeveloped markets where traditional investors hesitate. Jacqueline also shares examples of companies solving food insecurity and extreme climate risks for smallholder farmers and discusses how a “post-aid” world demands new tools, structures, and partnerships for impact investing.
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Forecasting Climate Risk with Geospatial AI: Sarah Russell of X , the Moonshot Factory at Alphabet
This episode, part of the Climate Rising series on climate resilience, features Sarah Russell, General Manager of Project Bellwether at X, The Moonshot Factory at Alphabet (formerly Google X). Sarah shares how geospatial data and artificial intelligence can help communities and businesses anticipate and respond to climate risks. Sarah shares insights from her work building predictive wildfire risk models using satellite imagery, AI, and systems design to enable more targeted insurance underwriting and disaster preparedness.
She also explains how Bellwether is creating geospatial AI infrastructure and tools to support natural disaster response by the National Guard. Sarah also shares how emerging foundational geospatial models will transform adaptation, and she offers career advice for those in climate tech and applied AI.
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Closing the Loop by Recycling Apparel: Reju CEO Patrik Frisk
Patrik Frisk, CEO of ReJu, joins Climate Rising to discuss his company’s mission to recycle textile waste and build circular supply chains for apparel made of polyester fabric. Patrik brings his prior experience leading Under Armour and other global brands across the textile and footwear industry for over 35 years.
Patrik describes how ReJu turns discarded apparel made of polyester blends into new polyester, and how it tackles the logistical and technical challenges of sorting, processing, and regenerating blended fabrics at scale. Patrik also describes relevant policy trends such as extended producer responsibility and offers advice for those pursuing careers in the circular economy.
Climate Rising is about the impact of climate change on business. It brings business and policy leaders and Harvard Business School faculty together to share insights about what businesses are doing, can do, and should do to confront climate change. It explores the many challenges and opportunities that climate change raises for managers, such as decisions about where they choose to locate, the technologies they develop and use, their strategies with respect to products, marketing, customer engagement, and policy—in other words, the full spectrum of business concerns.
Brasil