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“If you use low-cost capital, you don’t need tax credits to make the economics work. That’s what excites me the most about how to scale this thing up. […] How do I help every other community bank get in the game of building their green lending muscle and thinking about resilience? And if we can do that, then we don’t need all of the tax credits and all the incentives that everybody has thought we needed in this industry.”
— Chris Castro, founding director and chief sustainability officer, Climate First Bank
Federal support for climate and clean energy programs is being dismantled, and the question of who will finance resilience has turned urgent for communities throughout the Ten Across geography. The money that flowed from Washington is thinning; the need is not.
Few people have approached that question from as many sides as Chris Castro. He built Orlando’s sustainability and resilience office under Mayor Buddy Dyer, then moved to Washington as a presidential appointee, helping stand up the Department of Energy arm created to move historic infrastructure and climate funding to states, cities, and school districts — until the change in administration halted the work.
Now Castro is pursuing the same goal from inside the private sector. As founding director and chief sustainability officer of Climate First Bank, he is testing whether a community bank can finance resilience at a scale federal programs no longer will.
In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Chris Castro trace that arc from city hall to federal government to mission-driven banking, and land on a question 10X is now taking up with its own networks: what resilience officers need to know about finance.
Relevant Articles and Resources
Climate First Bank 2025 Impact Report
Community bank headquartered in St. Pete wants to be known for environmental investment (Tampa Bay Times, July 2026)
How Green Banks Are Financing The Future Of Clean Energy (Forbes, November 2025)
From Spongy Parks to Oyster Reefs, Investors Are Funding Ways to Adapt to Climate Change (Wall Street Journal, August 2025)
Resilience-Adjusted Credit Risk: Operationalising climate adaptation in financial decision-making (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, May 2026)
Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts
10X Convergence: The Region’s Experts Convene to Address the Insurability Crisis (November 2025)
Carolyn Kousky on Using Insurance Models to Drive Positive Change (April 2025)
Katrina’s 20th: Jeff Hébert on Community Recovery and Resilience (September 2025)
Episode Credits
Host: Duke Reiter
Audio Production: Louie Duran and Bryce Cristiano
Content Production: Kate Carefoot and Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Rae Ulrich and Sabine Butler
Guest Speaker
Chris Castro is the Founding Director, Executive Vice President, and Chief Sustainability Officer at Climate First Bank, the nation’s first FDIC-insured digital community bank focused on climate finance and impact investing. Previously, he served in the Biden administration as Chief of Staff for State and Community Energy Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy, helping oversee a multibillion-dollar portfolio of clean energy and climate initiatives, and spent nearly a decade leading sustainability and resilience efforts for the City of Orlando. Castro also co-founded the global nonprofit IDEAS For Us, the clean-energy consulting firm Citizen Energy, and Fleet Farming, an urban agriculture social enterprise, making him a recognized leader in advancing climate solutions through policy, innovation, and finance.
