Across the US, financial and wealth advisors are fielding questions about rising insurance premiums, climate-driven migration and how to safeguard long-term plans amid increasing global volatility. Yet the tools most advisors rely on were built for a different world — one defined by stability, linear growth, and predictable inflation.

A financial advisor at J.P. Morgan Private Bank recently told me, “Resilience is the number one topic on our clients’ minds, and our firm is scrambling to figure out how to get ahead of it. My clients are asking about whether their home will still be insurable in ten years, or how geopolitical shifts will impact their plan. I don’t have an answer.”

The world has changed. Our planning models haven’t.

The preparedness gap

For decades, financial planning has assumed that the past is a reliable guide to the future. Advisors have run Monte Carlo simulations based on historical returns, built cash-flow models with stable inflation inputs and trusted that major life events like job changes, retirements and home purchases would be the biggest sources of uncertainty.

But today, the uncertainty is systemic.

The average US family already loses roughly $400 to 900 per year to climate-related costs including higher insurance premiums, property damage, energy volatility and disrupted supply chains. Within our children’s lifetimes, that number is projected to rise to over $25,000 per year assuming multilateral “collaboration” in response to climate change continues along its current trajectory. 

These costs are not one-time shocks. They are structural shifts that ripple through every household balance sheet.

Meanwhile, advisors are increasingly on the front lines of this anxiety. When clients ask about relocation, rising premiums or the safety of their retirement community, they’re really asking a deeper question: Is my plan resilient? Traditional tools weren’t built to answer that.

When history stops being a predictor

Most financial planning software, like eMoney, RightCapital or MoneyGuidePro, rests on deterministic or historical assumptions. They simulate market returns, inflation and spending using data from the past fifty years, assuming those same patterns will roughly continue.

But the next fifty years will not look like the last fifty.

We’re entering an era of compound volatility, where climate, geopolitics, policy and technological shifts intertwine. Droughts impact crop yields and food prices. Insurance withdrawals reshape housing markets. Energy transitions alter inflation expectations. Even local policy changes can create regional winners and losers.

A static model can’t capture these dynamics. Advisors need tools and frameworks that help them model adaptive scenarios. For example: “What if property insurance becomes unavailable in California?” “What if extreme weather drives migration to the Midwest?” “What if policy incentives make electrification a net positive for household budgets?” “What if affordable healthcare goes away while health risks rise?” These aren’t theoretical questions anymore. 

The human side of volatility

Climate risk is often framed in technical or political terms, but its most immediate impact is emotional. Families feel it as uncertainty. They wonder if they’ll be able to rebuild after the next storm or whether their retirement nest egg will hold up if living costs spike.

For advisors, that emotion shows up in conversations with clients, and those conversations are where trust is won or lost.

When an advisor can’t answer these questions, clients may quietly disengage. They might not fire their advisor outright, but they stop referring friends, stop following advice or start second-guessing their plan.

Conversely, when advisors can contextualize uncertainty — showing clients how different futures might play out and what actions they can take today — it transforms fear into agency. Clients feel seen, informed and prepared.

That’s the heart of what I call climate-aware foresight: not predicting the future, but helping clients navigate plausible futures with confidence.

What climate-aware planning looks like

At its core, climate-aware financial planning doesn’t require replacing every tool in an advisor’s tech stack. It requires expanding the data and mindset behind planning conversations.

A climate-aware approach might include:

• Hyper-local risk mapping to understand how a client’s specific location affects property, insurance and community resilience
• Adaptive scenario modeling to stress-test plans against potential climate, policy and economic shocks
• Forward-looking cash-flow adjustments accounting for rising energy, insurance and relocation costs in long-term projections
• Values-based alignment to help clients connect financial decisions around investments, energy choices and giving with personal and planetary stewardship.

In our work at Stewy & Terra, we have seen how difficult it can be for individual managers to model these scenarios. We are building out a climate-aware financial planning layer — a software overlay that integrates with existing platforms. It will pull in dynamic climate datasets and use AI for scenario planning around climate, macro and policy shocks. Our goal is to help households manage their savings and adapt to a changing world.

That said, advisors don’t need specialized software to get started. For example, they can:

• Introduce basic “what-if” climate-aware scenarios into eMoney, RightCapital or MoneyGuidePro (e.g., insurance +25–50%, utilities +10–20%, home value stress tests).

• Use publicly available resources like FEMA Risk Factor, First Street and NOAA projections to frame location-based conversations.

• Incorporate insurance and housing volatility into emergency fund planning, even if roughly.

• Ask clients a simple resilience question during annual reviews: “Have any changes in your insurance, utilities, or local environment affected your financial life this year?”

In my opinion, the key is not to overwhelm clients with “doom data.” It’s to translate risk into relevance, turning complex variables into clear, actionable insights they can plan around. When advisors do this well, it builds an entirely new layer of trust. Clients don’t just see their advisor as a money manager; they see them as a navigator.

The business case for foresight

Beyond the ethical and emotional dimensions, climate-aware planning is a competitive advantage.

The advisory industry is entering a make-or-break decade. Cerulli projects that more than $100 trillion in wealth will pass to heirs by 2048 — including over $60 trillion to Millennials and Gen. Z. These generations expect personalization, transparency and purpose. They’re more likely to choose an advisor who helps them align financial goals with long-term resilience and values.

Advisors who can answer questions like “How might climate and policy shifts affect my plan?” will differentiate themselves in a crowded market. Advisors who can’t may watch their clients — and their clients’ children — walk away.

From reactive to proactive

In practice, this shift mirrors the broader evolution of financial planning itself. Just as the industry moved from commission-based sales to fiduciary advice, it’s now moving from reactive planning to adaptive foresight.

That change means shifting from annual reviews to continuous engagement, from static projections to living plans that evolve with real-time data, and from backward-looking reports to narratives that help clients understand the ‘why’ behind the numbers.

And importantly, it means reframing risk conversations. The goal isn’t to scare clients with climate data; it’s to empower them with context and choice.

Advisors don’t need to become climate scientists. They just need tools that bridge the gap between financial data and physical reality, translating complexity into clarity.

When advisors integrate foresight into financial advice, they help households become active participants in resilience, and that’s how markets change from the ground up.

Planning for the world ahead

As a new father, I often think about the world my son will inherit. The financial decisions we make today, such as what we insure, where we invest and how we plan, will shape not only our own security but the resilience of our communities.

Advisors play a pivotal role in that story. They’re the trusted guides who help families navigate uncertainty, align money with meaning and prepare for futures that may unfold differently than expected.

The advisors who thrive in the next decade will be those who embrace foresight, not fear. They’ll recognize that planning for a future that doesn’t mirror the past is not about predicting disaster. It’s about expanding possibility. The most powerful thing we can give clients isn’t certainty. It’s confidence in how to act when the world changes.

Chaun Lowe is the founder of Stewy & Terra, a company building the adaptive intelligence layer for the future of financial advice.

Guest posts on ImpactAlpha represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ImpactAlpha.