How will climate change and its governance redraw maps of financial flows across the world, and with what implications for whom? Can the resources needed for decarbonization and adaptation to already‐arriving climate impacts be mustered at the scale and rate needed to mitigate socioecological harms and planetary destabilizations? Can they be deployed in a way that does not exacerbate pre‐existing risks and injustices, themselves often bound up in legacies of financialized extraction? Such questions, empirical and normatively inflected, are drawing growing attention from geographers. Increasingly, this questioning is coalescing around an influential, though still definitionally unsettled term and concept: climate finance.@en

Amidst growing concerns about climate risks to the U.S. housing markets, strategies to physically retrofit homes are gaining attention—including within debates over how to resolve intersecting crises of housing re/insurability and affordability in highly exposed sites like Florida. We consider an important but under-studied example of this “climate-proofing” strategy unfolding today: Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) finance. While PACE has historically financed decarbonization retrofits, it is increasingly being deployed to facilitate hurricane risk reduction in Florida. In this paper, we introduce PACE: its basic characteristics, evolving uses, and controversies. Exploring the Florida case, we examine two deeper but as yet under-examined financial tensions: PACE’s intersections with other forms of property-linked finance (and potential systemic breakdowns) and rising affordability breakpoints as homeowners encounter its new debt amidst other growing and intersecting climate/climate response costs. These issues call for more transformative imaginaries of urban retrofitting and its resourcing.

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