Get ready for the resilience economy

Climate change cannot be ended by a piece of paper; that is not the point of global climate action negotiations. The goal is to formulate legal language that will, in a sustained way over time, incentivize and support cooperative innovation toward future security and prosperity.

Even if we stop global heating, restore degraded lands, waters, and ecosystems, and return to better than 1.5°C, adaptation and resilience measures would still be a practical, moral, and economic necessity virtually everywhere. What is missing from the discussion is the basic understanding by policy-makers, investors, and industry that this is not a choice. The money and opportunity will either be invested wisely to achieve collective climate rescue, or it will be sacrificed to an ever-worsening polycrisis.

Markets, whole economies, political systems, and our planet’s climate and biosphere, are all being distorted, to allow a specific way of doing business to win out against more efficient and effective competitors. The costs of this manipulated market dynamic are so pervasive and enormous it is almost impossible to describe them in standard economic language.

Unsustainable practices in food systems, made worse by climate disruption, are bleeding the world economy of roughly $40 billion per day, and leading to millions of deaths per year. Climate pollution is destabilizing ecosystems and watersheds and claiming millions more lives through air pollution. 

As we sift through the adopted negotiating texts that form the Belém Political Package, we see eight specific areas that will need urgent attention in the months ahead:

1. Rapid reductions in global heating pollutionare needed, to avoid future risk, harm, and cost. Reshaping energy systems to meet a zero pollution standard is urgently needed.
2. Transformation of food systems is needed to support agroecological and regenerative land use, improved human health, and long-term fiscal stability.
3. Multilevel climate governance must become the mainstream norm, across the world, with local, national, and international efforts reinforcing each other.
4. Indicators of successful Adaptation and Resilience need to be activated, localized, and linked to finance, trade, and incentives.
5. Climate-resilient infrastructure and adaptive design and capacity are needed everywhere; they cannot be an afterthought or a luxury.
6. To ensure these priorities are being met, stakeholders need to play a functional role in the development of multilevel climate policies, through open cooperative climate civics.
7. The health and resilience of ecosystems, watersheds, and biodiversity, are essential to overall security and prosperity.
8. Information integrity and continuous, precise, reliable, cross-referenced, and evolving Earth science observationsis essential to success in all areas and regions.

It is particularly important that climate-related policy and commerce make urgent progress in understanding the value of investment in the most vulnerable. The sooner we reduce serious climate risk to zero, the safer we will all be.

Trillions of dollars are already being spent on fossil-fueled climate disasters, without those expenditures being tied to value-builing adaptation and resilience. Some of the most valuable real estate in the world is becoming uninsurable, even as banks, cities, counties, and nations depend on those underlying claims of value to shape and sustain their own finances.

It is unaffordable to continue business as usual. The resilience imperative is systemic and built into all areas of human activity. Rapid business-model change is coming. Polluting industries need to get serious about a future without pollution.

The countries, companies, and financial institutions that develop the adaptive, clean, innovative business models needed to thrive without climate pollution, will be the beneficiaries of the new efficiencies those practices build into everyday experience. To jump start the resilience economy national and local governments should: 

1. Set clear national standards that prioritize investments in co-benefits that reduce geophysical danger and support enhanced human security.
2. Shift subsidies away from destructive practices toward practices that deliver similar primary benefits (clean energy vs. polluting, for instance) while also delivering a range of value-building co-benefits.
3. Incentivize major investment in resilience-focused enterprise and innovation, rather than large, resource-intensive industries that might provide only marginal benefits.
4. Support local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provide risk reduction and resilience services at community and regional levels.
5. Guide commercial banks in providing services that help those resilience-building SMEs grow, serve more people, and improve quality of life at scale.
6. Work with international partners to establish fiscal resilience cooperative frameworks, to make it easier to reallocate capital quickly to the resilience economy.

Read our full report on COP30