Climate change is not a crisis for everyone. Some people—the people that McKenzie Funk writes about in his new book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming—hope to profit from the warming planet.

Funk, who covered the Arctic landgrab for National Geographic magazine in 2009, traveled to two dozen countries to document the business opportunities created by a global disaster, including an Israeli company that sells snowmaking machines to Alpine ski resorts, a Wall Street investor who buys up Sudanese farm land, Dutch companies that hawk their flood-fighting savvy, and a Seattle company that collects patents on geoengineering technologies.

National Geographic spoke with McKenzie Funk about how to profit from a looming catastrophe.

I think it's important to put a