Ep. 1: Bessie Schwarz - Reinventing Flood Insurance
It's always so fun seeing great companies being built for the right reasons. Bessie Schwarz, CEO of Floodbase, has been on a mission to help the world's most vulnerable people since her early 20s. Her company is not only the flood monitoring partner of FEMA and the United Nations, she is also forging a quiet revolution in the insurance industry, helping to bring parametric flood insurance (long mooted but not feasible until now) to reality. Their announcement last year alongside one of the world’s leading reinsurers of the provision of parametric flood insurance for the rural farmers of Colombia is a world first. Alongside her co-founder Beth, they are building a company with enormous impact and commercial potential. Plus, she's awesome. Please enjoy my conversation with Bessie Schwarz.
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Full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content below.
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This episode of The Fundamental Molecule podcast features an interview with Bessie Schwarz, co-founder and CEO of Floodbase (formerly known as Cloud to Street). Floodbase provides advanced, near-real time flood monitoring globally by combining satellite imagery and ground data. Bessie discusses how Floodbase got started, their work monitoring floods for governments and the UN, and their move into the insurance industry to provide parametric flood insurance.
Episode Highlights:
Bessie co-founded Floodbase with the goal of using information technology to help communities equitably adapt to climate change disasters like flooding. After meeting at Yale, Bessie and co-founder Beth Tellman created an algorithm to detect flooding from satellite images.
Floodbase is the flood monitoring partner for the UN, helping them with disaster response and relocation when floods threaten vulnerable communities. Their flood monitoring methodology was featured on the cover of Nature magazine.
They are now working with insurance companies to provide parametric flood insurance that pays out when a flood event surpasses a given size measured by a combination of satellite and ground sensor data , expanding coverage to uninsurable areas and risks.
In the podcast, Bessie points out that financing is one of the biggest challenges for climate adaptation. Insurance can help redirect capital to at-risk places and resilience projects, but the mechanism and data for insurance underwriting and payouts has to be there.
Bessie and Tom discuss the importance of viewing climate resilience not only through a mitigation lens but also as adaptation. Adaptation is a lot more hopeful than long-term technological fixes.
Bessie’s advice to founders - Effective storytelling requires using simple language, balancing fear and hope (2 doses fear, 5 hope), and focusing on solutions.
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