Building the evidence, metrics, and market infrastructure to make adaptation and resilience investable.
Capital is increasingly focused on climate adaptation and risk management, and there is no shortage of communities, utilities, hospitals, and companies that need to harden against climate risk. The money and the need are not finding each other with the urgency that the climate crisis demands.
Part of the reason is that resilience is hard to price. A mitigation project produces a loss that never happens, and an avoided loss does not appear on a balance sheet the way a revenue stream does. Underwriters, ratings agencies, and infrastructure investors are left estimating a benefit that no one has agreed how to measure.
The Resilience Capital Lab works on that problem. We build the evidence base, the metrics, and the market infrastructure to help the case for climate adaptation and resilience be underwritten, rated, and financed.
Two problems sit behind most of this. The first is knowing which variables matter. The second is causal evidence that a given investment produced a given financial outcome. A starting point is enumerating the variables, and showing how they played out at specific companies, and providing analysts enough to build the case internally.
| What capital needs | What exists today | What the Lab is building |
|---|---|---|
| 01A loss-avoidance number that survives diligence | Benefit-cost ratios written for federal grant applications, not for underwriting | Avoided-loss estimates specified for use in credit, insurance, and capital budgeting decisions |
| 02Metrics that are comparable across projects | Bespoke resilience scores, mostly proprietary and rarely audited | Open, documented metrics that a third party can reproduce from published methods |
| 03Risk assessment that accounts for adaptation | Physical risk scores that stop at exposure and seldom credit mitigation already in place | Adaptation-adjusted risk assessment, validated against observed outcomes |
| 04Deal structures that do not start from zero | One-off transactions, each negotiated and documented from scratch | Reference structures, model terms, and case documentation others can build on |
Three workstreams, matched to the three things a market needs before it can function.
What actually reduces loss, by how much, and under what conditions. We work from observed outcomes rather than modeled ones wherever the data allows it.
Measurement that someone outside the room can check. Methods are published, inputs are documented, and results are reproducible.
The standards, reference terms, and convening work that let a transaction close without reinventing itself. Boring, and the reason nothing scales without it.
See related work from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness
Index insurance and index-based disaster risk management, at scale with smallholder farmers across more than a dozen countries.
Research · ToolA data-informed view of how climate exposure and financial fragility compound at the country level.
Practice + PolicyHow households, businesses, and local economies absorb a shock, and what changes the recovery curve.
Preparedness ToolsNCDP's hazard exposure index, with climate change projections for wildfire, tornado, sea level rise, and tropical cyclone.
Practice + PolicyTriggering finance and action ahead of an event rather than after it.
Research · Case studiesStudent-led case studies reconstructing disasters from multiple sources. The policy-side companion to the Lab's financial cases.
See more from friends and colleagues looking into the business of resilience beyond this lab
Louie Woodall's newsletter and podcast on climate adaptation finance, technology, and policy. The closest thing the adaptation economy has to a trade press, and a useful running record of where deals and standards are actually landing.
Visit Climate ProofWriting and case studies on the economics of disaster: what prevention is worth, who pays for it, and what the numbers look like afterward. The case study library is a working input to the Lab's evidence base.
Visit The Disaster CapitalistA cross-industry working group building shared tooling for the corporate adaptation case, including a value-lever model for the financial benefit of adaptation. NCDP takes part in the working groups and contributes case-study methodology.
Visit Adaptation ExchangeLinks to external sites are provided for reference. Content on those sites reflects the views of their authors and does not represent the views of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, the Columbia Climate School, or Columbia University.
The Lab's main method for the evidence problem. Rather than modeling an avoided loss in the abstract, each case reconstructs a specific event: what was invested beforehand, what happened, and what it cost or saved on the books afterward. Sources are triangulated so that no single disclosure carries the finding.
A new set of cases is under development by the Lab, built from corporate disclosures, company filings, and ratings agency analysis. Each one puts a number on what mitigation did, or failed to do, to a balance sheet after a real event.
Student-led, focused on the policy and governance side of the same events. Same triangulation method, different question. The two libraries are designed to be read against each other.
Working sessions the Lab convenes or co-hosts, kept deliberately small so that the people who would have to use a metric get to argue about it before it is finalized.
Where Capital Meets Ecosystems: Mobilizing Finance for Nature and Resilience
Convened a month ahead of COP17, the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Yerevan, this dialogue brings governments, financial institutions, private finance actors, and multilateral partners together around two constraints on nature finance: capital that could move at scale is still waiting for the catalytic structures that make nature-based investment bankable, and the project-level data investors need to price risk rarely exists at the point a decision is actually made.
A third constraint sits underneath both. Many of the assets in question are ecological assets and resilience infrastructure at once. Each carries two value streams and no accepted way to price either, so it competes for capital on the strength of neither. The Lab moderates the session on tools and solutions for investor decision-making, and closes the dialogue.
Sessions convened by others where the staff from the Lab are taking part.
The Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Working Group (GARI) convenes a practical discussion on mobilizing private investment for climate adaptation and resilience. Drawing on emerging findings from the Climate Adaptation Innovation and Learning white paper and its investor Community of Practice, the session explores the state of the resilience investment market, lessons from investors already putting capital to work, and the actions needed to move from evidence to allocation.
A breakfast roundtable convened by the Inter-American Development Bank with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, on a single question: under what conditions does acting ahead of a disaster pay for itself from the perspective of a government budget? It builds on an analysis by academics at the University of Oxford, drawing on eleven country-hazard frameworks across Latin America and the Caribbean. The study finds the fiscal case is strongest for well-forecast, recurrent hazards. The session asks how development banks can finance anticipatory action without adding to the fiscal burden of the governments that need it.
Papers, briefs, and commentary from the Lab.
Coming Soon…
The Lab is co-directed out of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
Director, National Center for Disaster Preparedness; Associate Professor for Professional Practice in Climate, Columbia Climate School
Jeff Schlegelmilch directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, where his work spans public health preparedness, community resilience, and the integration of private and public sector capabilities. He is the author of Rethinking Readiness: A Brief Guide to Twenty-First-Century Megadisasters and co-author, with Ellen Carlin, of Catastrophic Incentives: Why Our Approaches to Disasters Keep Falling Short, both from Columbia University Press. He is an opinion contributor with The Hill and has advised private sector organizations on grid resilience planning and governments at every level on preparedness systems and policy.
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Staff Associate III, Columbia Climate School; Associate in Climate Change Adaptation
Miren Gil-Vernet Pagonabarraga is a researcher at the Columbia Climate School, where her work spans adaptation and resilience finance in emerging markets and community resilience. She manages the Climate Capacity Training Program with UNICEF and teaches and mentors graduate students at the Climate School. She previously worked on climate finance at Capital for Climate, researching nature-based solutions funds across South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and at Genesis Analytics, developing national climate investment plans, evaluating climate risk insurance and adaptation finance programs for clients including the UN Development Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the NDC Partnership.
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