Blizzards trap mountain residents in Los Angeles County. Tornados barrel across Louisiana and Kentucky. Triple-digit temperatures stifle south Texas. Deadly floods submerge parts of South Carolina, even as snowstorms sweep from the Great Lakes to New England, leaving 100,000 residents without power. In Washington, D.C., the Capitol’s famed cherry blossom trees are blooming early, nudged by an unseasonable heat wave.

And those are weather alerts just for the first week of March 2023.

Unprecedented, historic, epic and record-breaking “natural” disasters tied to global warming and climate change were barely on industry’s radar five years ago. But when weather defies description and single events rack up billions of dollars in damage, real estate investors demand answers. Now, catastrophic and costly disasters, and what to do about them, are mission-critical budget items for commercial real estate stakeholders, even as they face a plethora of state and federal ESG