A New Way to Finance Resilience

The plans exist. The market has depth. What’s missing is the financial framework to connect risk, priorities, and capital.

Governments aren’t short on resilience plans, adaptation strategies, or white papers. What’s been missing is a shared way to price the risk of doing nothing — and that price is rising faster than most budgets can react. RiskReserves Tool puts a number on it.

Developed by The Resiliency Company × GFOA
120 Years · GFOA 1906–2026
The Cost of Waiting

It isn’t just the big disasters anymore.

Chronic risk and deferred maintenance are compounding just as fast as catastrophic loss — quietly adding up on public balance sheets long before the next headline event forces the issue.

Repeated Nuisance Flooding

Damaging roads and utilities
$3.2B+
annual damages from nuisance flooding in the U.S.
Source: First Street Foundation

Heat Waves

Driving up emergency services and health costs
$1.6B+
annual increase in healthcare costs linked to extreme heat
Source: JAMA Health Forum

Minor Storms

Degrading infrastructure faster than planned
2–4x
faster deterioration of roads and bridges in high-risk areas
Source: ASCE Infrastructure Report Card

Repeated Repairs

That never qualify for federal aid
$∞
the cycle continues — repair, repeat, repeat again
 

Lost Economic Activity

Not reimbursed damage
$520B+
in annual U.S. economic losses from weather-related disruptions
Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Deferred Infrastructure Maintenance

Every year of delay increases future costs and risk
$300B+
backlog in U.S. public infrastructure investment
Source: ASCE Infrastructure Report Card
The Language of Resilience
Avoided losses Resilience dividend Co-benefits For every $1 invested, $6 saved Triple dividend Risk transfer Benefit–cost ratio Return on resilience Climate-adjusted value Future-proofing 13× return

Not one of these claims can be made without a common understanding of the liability that specific risks — and combinations of them — pose to a government as a whole.

Every one of these terms is a return measured against a loss. Until the loss is quantified for a particular jurisdiction, the return is a figure of speech.

Why We Built This

We built a way to quantify the liability — so the dividend becomes real.

Resilience officers and finance officers are often describing the same risk in two different languages. One speaks in hazards, adaptation measures, and co-benefits. The other speaks in balance sheets, credit ratings, and budget cycles. RiskReserves Tool translates between them — a single, defensible way to price the financial liability that unmitigated physical risk poses to a government, so resilience investments can be evaluated, and funded, like any other material risk to the public purse.

What that requires
01

Finance lens

Describe risk through the lens of government finance — not through engineering or insurance lenses.

02

Consistent estimates

Estimate expected financial consequences in a consistent, defensible way that can be compared across different hazards.

03

Shared understanding

Be understandable enough that finance officers, city managers, elected officials and community stakeholders can all have the same conversation.

04

Institutional trust

Originate from a place of institutional trust.

How It Works

A proven model for risk-responsive financial planning

A probabilistic risk methodology shows jurisdictions the fiscal impact of future shocks on their operating budget and reserve position. RRT combines historical loss data, weather and hazard risk, economic indicators, and proprietary insurance-brokerage assessments — then runs thousands of forward-looking scenarios to support evidence-based budget decisions.

Jurisdiction assumptionsReserves, revenues, expenditures, spending posture
Peril tablesEarthquake / hurricane / wildfire / flood / severe convective storm event sequences
Recession historyNational recession dates, per-revenue volatility priors, and property and sales tax impairment

Monte Carlo Engine

10,000 independent trials · 10-year horizon each

10,000
forward-looking scenarios, each over a ten-year horizonA Monte Carlo model: every trial samples recession and peril events together, so the output is a distribution of plausible futures — not a single forecast.
See The Tool In Action

Four things every finance officer walks away knowing

Where your reserves sit on the spectrum

An assessment of the current reserve amount — read as a band, not a single target.

Reserves above the efficient ceilingSample jurisdiction reserves of $83.3M sit well above the $37.9M point where the cumulative-probability curve flattens. Dollars beyond that level are at a point of diminishing returns — they could fund other near-term capital priorities or be invested in risk reduction towards the quantified drivers of your jurisdiction's analyzed liabilities.
$21.7M
$37.9M
You · $83.3M
Below floor · sufficiency under 80%
In range · sufficiency 80–90%
Above range · sufficiency over 90%

Identify the principal driver of balance-sheet risk

Every hazard in the model, ranked by share of total modeled risk.

ConcentrationRecession and flood drive roughly 95% of modeled risk for a typical mid-size jurisdiction; earthquake and wildfire barely register unless local exposure says otherwise.
HazardAnnual chanceTypical hitSevere hitShare of risk
Recession26%$7.6M$11.5M
54%
Flood13%$5.5M$10.2M
38%
Earthquake0.2%$66.3M$111.1M
5%
Wildfire<0.1%$15.7M$15.7M
0%

10-year reserve projection

A distributional view across 10,000 simulated paths — not a forecast. The band shows the spread of plausible outcomes.

ReadBy Y10, the median simulated reserve fund amount lands at $72.1 million, well above the financial survivability threshold of $15.7 million. This reinforces the argument that your reserves exceed your needs, as even in the 10th percentile, you will have a large cushion.
$100M $75M $50M $25M $0 Survivability · $30.7M 90th: $92.2M Median: $72.1M 10th: $48.3M Y1 Y3 Y5 Y7 Y9

Illustrative sample path built from the deck's published methodology and figures. Your jurisdiction's actual projection is generated from your own budget and hazard data.

Understand fiscal policy changes and shocks before they happen

Move the levers you control, then dial in a shock outside your control. Try it below.

Recession severity
Flood severity
Earthquake severity
Modeled 10-yr reserve survivability
92%
Reserves comfortably absorb a decade of modeled shocks.

Simplified illustrative model for demonstration only — the live RiskReserves Tool runs a full 10,000-trial Monte Carlo simulation against your jurisdiction's real budget and hazard data.

In Their Words

“Salt Lake City was very impressed with the work on the City's Risk Reserve Policy Analysis. They thoroughly understood the City's financial policies and risk tolerance and were instrumental in training city staff on the implemented reserve model.”

Andrew ReedFinancial Analytics Manager, Salt Lake City, Utah

“The City of Vista engaged to identify the potential and magnitude of revenue loss from a recession and natural catastrophes like wildfires, earthquakes and floods.”

Mike SylviaDirector of Finance / City Treasurer, Vista, California

Government Finance Officers Association

The largest membership organization of finance officers in the U.S. and Canada, serving 7,800 local government units — with an explicit focus on financial decision-makers, a 6,000-attendee annual gathering, and a state-level network across 15+ states.

The Resiliency Company

A non-profit do-tank mobilizing the funding, policy, and innovation required to live safely in a time of accelerating disasters — supporting local and state government in building the next generation of American infrastructure.

Market proof: Santa Fe County's own September 2024 RFP calls for a policy to "replace its existing Fund Balance, Reserve, and Budget Contingencies Policy with a risk-based reserve policy based upon chance-based simulation" — the exact model RiskReserves runs today.
What Comes Next

Bring RiskReserves to your community

A joint initiative of The Resiliency Company and the Government Finance Officers Association.