the interview: Bessie Schwarz

Bessie Schwarz is the CEO and Co-founder of Cloud to Street, the leading platform for monitoring, mapping, and analyzing floods and flood risk around the world for the most climate vulnerable communities and governments. She is an expert in designing and implementing products for low and middle income countries and communities, as well as in Human-Centered Design for empirically based disaster response tools. Her technical training is in geospatial analytics and social psychology, with a focus on risk and climate change communication.

Bessie serves as the Senior Strategy Advisor to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, where she founded a consulting practice to support campaigns with climate communication research and models. She has a Masters of Science from Yale University and a BA in Philosophy and Environmental Science and Technology from Carleton College, and is an Echoing Green Fellow, Draper Richard Kaplan Entrepreneur and Miller Center Scholar.

Your interest in sustainability seems to date back to your college days, when you pursued environmental studies at Yale. What was it about sustainability that interested you at such a young age?

My interest in sustainability actually goes back way earlier than college. I’ve been focused on true environmentalism and environmental health, as well as environmental ethics, since high school. As a 15 year old from very suburban, lovely New Jersey, I went on a long seven week hiking trip in the woods where I didn’t leave the woods for that entire time. And it was really the first time that opened my eyes up to something much greater than myself, that was worth protecting. That set me off into a course of considering how we think of humans as part of the natural world and thinking of how we protect humans as well as the whole community in meaningful ways. It was a very profound experience for me to connect to nature, but also to think more about how we actually survive.

So I did work on sustainability and environmentalism throughout high school and then into college. When I was graduating from college in 2008, that’s when I had to consider how to work on this issue that I cared deeply about in a professional context. It was clear, even then, that I could not work on anything other than climate change — I couldn’t justify working on any other issue, because it’s the future of our entire species.

From joining Green Corps after graduation to spending time with Environment America, you’ve done extensive work in the field. How did your field work inform the approach you’ve taken with Cloud to Street?

First and foremost, I see myself as an organizer, at least in terms of mentality (though I don’t really have the right to call myself an organizer anymore). I’ve derived a lot of my theory of change and theory of organization building from the approaches I learned as a community organizer.

In terms of the ways I’ve brought that experience to Cloud to Street, they’re innumerable. When I worked in coastal Florida during my first rotation with Green Corps, I had to speak with families that had been living in the area for generations about the likelihood that they would have to relocate in the near future. In my role as an organizer, I was trying to make them realize the power they could have if they came together and leveraged their collective influence within the system. To me, that’s what an organizer does at the high level, and it’s the theory of change at the very core of Cloud to Street — you have to analyze the broader power structure that creates situations of unmet need or inequity and help those affected find their own agency to rebalance the power structure.

I then went to Environment America to lead field work with a team of people at the national level coordinated strategically across the country, but the impact I was having was clearly not going to scale at the speed of climate change. I went to grad school to investigate ways to scale my impact and met my co-founder, who had been studying coffee in El Salvador as a Fulbright Scholar when the area was hit with a hurricane. Her experience there with the highly ineffective disaster relief efforts in El Salvador led her to abandon her research and start a nonprofit to help build resilience. In many ways, our two backgrounds in the field led us to realize a lack of information was causing a lack of access to services and inability to advocate for services. In that way I think the method of building Cloud to Street borrows quite a bit from an organizer strategy.

My cofounder and I never intended to start a venture-backed business in Cloud to Street — we’re trying to create a very specific thing in the world, and we just happen to have found a VC-backed hyperlocal startup as the avenue for doing that. We’re very serious about scaling, but the underlying motivation is about the mission and trying to ensure that everybody has access to the information they need to be climate resilient.

Cloud to Street uses a global network of optical and radar satellites to monitor floods across the globe. As someone with no visible experience in satellite science, how did you go about building out your technology?

This part of the Cloud to Street story is really about partnerships, and the importance of co-founders for many types of businesses, especially those that are more complicated. I had a scientific background with some experience in GIS / geospatial analytics in an academic sense, but zero experience in remote sensing or satellite science. However, I have a brilliant co-founder, Beth, who is a relatively well-known scientist in the field. I did chip in on building the original algorithm that we presented to Google back in the day, but I’m not a great programmer — the magic really came from my relationship with Beth and our ability to blend our ideas together.

Beyond that, a lot of Cloud to Street’s success has been built on the back of technology that has just recently been developed. Google came to Yale while Beth and I were there and presented an extremely early version of what’s called Google Earth Engine, their satellite analytics platform. Google had downloaded all of the free public government satellite imagery that had been taken for decades and allowed users to process it for free on Google Cloud computing. Decades of planetary scale imagery that you would otherwise have to request image by image from the government was now available stitched globally, and you could combine that with paralyzed cloud computing. That technology totally changed what was possible in terms of democratizing information and paved the way for what we’ve built at Cloud to Street.

You’ve built a data set of all the floods that have happened over the past 30 years. How have you seen climate change impact flooding in the past five years since you started the company?

When we started in 2013, roughly 10–15 million people were affected by a flood every single year — those numbers are expected to double by 2030, due to climate change and due to population migration. People are moving into floodplains on coastal areas and port cities, while in those floodplains climate change is causing floods to become more and more frequent as well as more intense and less predictable. Floods are also more than half of all disasters, and more than half of all loss from disasters comes from flooding. So floods are a very harmful disaster to protect against and difficult to analyze.

As a result, there are countless examples of governments and communities not having actionable data to take action or capital to support actions that would help mitigate the losses from flooding. Part of the difficulty is also that there’s no one solution — the right mitigation strategy might depend on how high the risk is or how many resources the community has. We need to take a holistic approach to risk planning and resilience.

There seems to have been an increase in the number of companies founded and funded in sustainability in the past year. What similarities and differences do you see between this wave of innovation and investment and the cleantech boom of the mid-2000s?

One difference that’s been incredibly clear to me is the addition of climate resilience and adaptation into the list of solutions that are considered VC-backable. The first wave of investment in the mid-2000s was focused on clean tech, which was really about trying to create clean and renewable energy solutions.

We just raised our first round of venture capital, and I was very impressed by the depth of thought that investors have given to the space. Many investors have now incorporated adaptation and climate resilience, which is what we’re focused on, as a core part of their theses around climate tech investing.

Your organization has partnered with several governments and global institutions. How do you think the public sector can best work with private organizations to address sustainability issues?

As with any major challenge that’s this systemic and this complicated, the solutions have to be a mix of private and public. With the amount of climate risk and flood risk that we are currently facing, there’s no way it can be addressed by public dollars. Right now, roughly 5% of actual losses are met by immediate aid from the public sector.

I think it’s necessary for us to innovate as much on the financial means of getting aid to people during disasters as it is to innovate on actual technology in clean energy, for example. For example, we’re working on parametric insurance using external data rather than having to send a representative in person to assess the damage from a flood, which can improve access to relief across rural or low income communities. Government excess loss is also a true partnership between government and the private sector — at first we had governments wanting to take action against our data but lacking funds to do so, and we had insurance companies asking to underwrite risk based on our data. Matching those two types of organizations together to enable governments to offload or transfer some of their risk is a win-win opportunity and one example of how the public and private sectors can work together.

Sustainability is a very broad area, encompassing everything from the circular economy to plant-based / alternative proteins to decarbonization and electrification. What trends in sustainability are you most excited to see play out in the next five years?

I’m not going to answer this comprehensively at all, but I’ll comment on two trends at different ends of the spectrum. The new wave of investment interest in the space that you mentioned is very essential and a trend that I’m excited to see continue. More broadly, I’ve heard more and more individuals in private equity or traditional finance also interested in this challenge from an ethical perspective and from a financial perspective.

The other end of the spectrum is the increasing focus on climate change within local communities and local knowledge around what resilience looks like. I think there are a number of organizations, like the Climate Justice Alliance in New York, that have demonstrated incredible leadership in building community resilience at a local level that will become the blueprint for broader efforts at scale. Going back to my organizer roots, I can see real change happening from these people realizing their own agency, and that’s incredibly powerful.

What is your favorite company in the sustainability space (besides Cloud to Street)?

It’s not a company, but my favorite organization in the space is the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy.

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Know someone building an exciting new company in sustainability? Get in touch @ brittany@crv.com.