The climate risk that pays is where clients live

Pete Krull arrived at Climate Week 2026 in New York City with a new book in hand, having left a legacy firm in 2004 to found Earth Equity Advisors in Asheville, North Carolina and carried the same sustainable-investing argument through the changes in political administration and market conditions that followed. He presented a copy of "The Sustainable Investor" to Bill Nye, then sat for an interview with Financial Planning, and the part of that interview another advisor can actually use is his account of how clients move.

Asked whether any client had changed a retirement plan because of what is happening to the environment, Krull answered without hesitation: "A good portion of our clients have, because they come to us specifically for what we do." The second half is the part worth underlining: the clients who acted did not arrive as a slice of the broader retiree market but came pre-sorted, having already chosen a firm whose proposition is the thing they believed.

Krull describes everyone else as having been on autopilot in traditional investments until an epiphany arrived, and his practice is where the epiphany is assumed rather than produced. His experience tells an advisor what happens after a client is converted, which is genuinely useful, and almost nothing about how many clients are ready to convert, which is the harder question for anyone deciding whether to build a climate practice.

Krull is unusually direct about how conversion happens: "Until [climate change] actually hits people at home, they're going to have a really hard time believing in the reality of it," he said, pointing to a fragmented media world in which people get only the outlets they care to seek out. His own illustration came in September 2024, when Hurricane Helene tore through his mountain town: "People were killed and lives were swept down the river," he said, and he remembers standing on a bridge watching the water because his own house sat up the hill and was spared, then walking down to see the flood sliding through town past three-story buildings whose tops were barely visible.

This past summer's heat waves, record-breaking flooding and other extreme weather across the globe handed him fresh material for an argument he has made for more than two decades, and the part of it that reaches a planning practice is the decision the weather forces: a planning one. Financial Planning framed the interview around the idea that climate change obliges advisors and clients to rethink retirement investing, including where they decide to live out their golden years.

That decision is where the practice value sits. The last mile of retirement is a documentation problem, and the firms that put claiming-age and incapacity decisions inside the plan win the transfer before an estate settles. Climate risk belongs in the same file: a client weighing a move is at once making a spending decision, a tax decision that may cross state lines, an insurance decision and a timing decision, and all four live in the plan document. None of those four answers lives in a fund recommendation, which is why the planning firms are the ones positioned to have this conversation at all.

The investment question does not disappear. Krull organizes the portfolio side around six pillars—among them energy transition, infrastructure, water and transportation—and he says the returns from impact investing are competitive with traditional indexes and benchmarks, though the interview puts no figures behind that claim. His description of bringing a client around involves showing a comparison against a yardstick, whatever the yardstick happens to be, and performance is the tiebreaker he uses.

That helps explain why this conversation behaves like a planning service more than an investment product, and why the advisors most likely to keep these clients are the ones who bill for the plan. In August we wrote that active management's losing decade has given advisors a defensible reason to sell planning and tax work instead of fund picks. Climate risk is another entry in that ledger, and a stronger one, since the client supplies the prompt.

The caution is that none of this establishes broad demand. Krull's clients sought him out, and retirees who have not yet had their own Helene have, by his own account, little reason to change course. Build a climate offering on an assumption of general appetite and it will reach a narrower group than any conference stage suggests; wait for the questions to arrive unprompted and the first one may land just after an event that has already changed where the client lives, or what their insurance costs, or both.

The interview offers no performance record, client count, or tally of plans that changed after 2024, but it does carry the sequence—experience first, belief second, planning decision third—and a practitioner's version of the takeaway. Krull has been making this case since 2004, mostly to people who came looking for it. Advisors who start making it now face a different opening question than the one they prepared for: where the client intends to live, and whether the plan still works if that answer changes.