David Adler (Groundswell)

Climate risk has long been viewed as a threat to physical assets and business revenues. In this episode, we sit down with David Adler, co-founder of Groundswell, to make the case for a different framing entirely — one that puts human health at the center of the adaptation story. Groundswell is a US-based platform that connects climate hazards directly to health outcomes, drawing on over 500 climate-health risk factors from peer-reviewed research and layering in demographic and socioeconomic data to produce neighbourhood-level forecasts of mortality, hospitalisations, disease burden, and healthcare costs. In this conversation, David explains why our healthcare systems are poorly equipped for a climate-changed world where demand surges are harder to predict and cascading risks interact in ways we're only beginning to understand. David also shares some hard-won wisdom: that in the entrepreneurship game, community matters. Whether you're selling to a health system or surviving a rough quarter, the relationships you build in the ecosystem are what carry you through.