Communities everywhere need risk reduction and resilience measures.
Green infrastructure—including soil biomass and well-rooted forests, mangroves in coastal areas prone to tropical storms, and mountain glaciers that serve as stable headwaters for healthy watersheds—is essential for maintaining human security and prosperity. Costs of climate inaction are reaching record levels, so even governments that wish to deprioritize climate action are spending more than ever.
A recent report titled Returns on Resilience found that focused, evidence-based, proactive investment in adaptation and resilience measures will create 280 million new jobs, globally, over the next decade. The market for adaptation and resilience services is expected to reach $1.3 trillion per year by 2030, and vulnerable areas could see a significant economic boost as a result.
That economic boost to vulnerable regions and communities means they will be more investable, more insurable, and better able to sustain their populations. This is an essential ingredient for stable economic development everywhere; failure to reduce risk and build resilience is projected to create conditions of overwhelming disruption and chaos in coming decades. The 2023 State of the Climate report warned:
By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023).
The world we are in now is one where a few million refugees can fundamentally alter the politics and economics of dozens of countries, even if few of them reach those countries. Today, most involuntarily displaced people are internally displaced, refugees within their own countries. Imagine a world in which billions of people cannot live where they are, in which the everyday security and wellbeing of their family requires them to find a new home, where whole regions of the world are uninhabitable due to climate breakdown, conflict, economic chaos, and nation-state failure.
Zero harm is the transformational goal
If your highest aspiration is easy to achieve, you are less likely to make transformational change. Preventing danger needs to be an everyday, ongoing, shared goal, guiding us toward better efforts and better outcomes. The simplest, clearest, most universally actionable way to infuse the preventing danger mission into everyday life and business is to adopt a standard of zero harm—to cause zero preventable harm to people or ecosystems.
Chaos and thriving are not compatible. Thriving in a fortified enclave is not thriving, and it is not sustainable. The “livable region” in a world so radically disrupted will likely feel unlivable by today’s standards, due to persistent conditions of economic and political volatility.
From the time we embraced combustible fuels as a core ingredient of human industrial development, we began altering the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere. From the time we understood that industrial capacity would eventually reach the point where global heating would ensue, we have been on course for this moment.
In 1992, when nearly 200 nations agreed to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, we had a choice—to decarbonize quickly, to slow and reverse global heating, or to be saddled with ever-increasing costs of disruption and rapid transition. Inaction has led to this moment, where climate disruption, Nature loss, pathogen spillovers, and global threats to public health, all contribute to an upward spiral of unplanned cost and waste.
But we are not yet past the point where proactive measures are not warranted. The best ecoomic future lies in deliberate, coordinated, economy-wide investment in climate risk reduction and resilience-building. Those places that do the most, early enough, with enough in-built adaptive capacity, to reduce the overall threat of global climate disruption, to secure against shock events, enact ever-ready means of recovery, and steward the resilience economy, will be epicenters of political, technological, and economic leadership.
The question for each jurisdiction, from local to national, and for each market actor, is how best to play this role.
The answer must be contextual, with deference to interactive dynamics, meaning:
- Coastal cities need to build both hard and green infrastructure to defend against rising seas and intensifying storms.
- Upland regions need to build soil ecology and forest cover, to stabilize landscapes that might otherwise contribute to devastating mudslides and flooding events.
- Arid and semi-arid regions need to guard against wildfire risk, which is now a year-round threat, even in regions as wet as British Columbia and as cold as Siberia.
- Agricultural regions need to end destructive pollution, prioritize ecosystem restoration, enhance incomes with climate services, and diversify local economies.
- And all regions need to find ways to make cooperative investments that support real-world resilience benefits to others, so the global threat matrix can be managed.
Weather services are needed everywhere. There cannot be places condemned to live without the benefit of reliable, ongoing, real-time Earth system science. The human costs will be too great. Nations that fail to protect their people lose credibility and eventually decline and collapse.
Adaptive design thinking can rewire systems for success
Effective climate policies cannot be a simple one-time upgrade to an existing policy or program. They need to create an operational context in which continuous adjustment, refinement, and innovation, are expected needs to which resources are assigned. Add agility by investing in multilevel governance; support success locally, regionally, and nationally. All the money in the world is at stake.
The following is a rough sketch future-building strategy any country might adopt, in these difficult times:
- Set clear national standards that prioritize investments in co-benefits that reduce geophysical danger and support enhanced human security.
- 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.
- Incentivize major investment in resilience-focused enterprise and innovation, rather than large, resource-intensive industries that might provide only marginal benefits.
- Support local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provide risk reduction and resilience services at community and regional levels.
- Guide commercial banks in providing services that help those resilience-building SMEs grow, serve more people, and improve quality of life at scale.
- Work with international partners to establish fiscal resilience cooperative frameworks, to make it easier to reallocate capital quickly to the resilience economy.
Each of these priority areas of action adds adaptive capacity and holds promise to make capital investment more efficient at overall value creation. That means: more jobs, diversified service and innovation activities, more stability in local economies, and a more secure and prosperous future for the country.
A report from the Climate Value Exchange.
