The crucial shift to adaptation and resilience: and how it enables mitigation
Leveraging multi-purpose solutions across nature and more
We need to fund both mitigation and adaptation. That’s been the case for years now, and the LA Wildfires are yet another heartbreaking reminder of how susceptible we are to the impacts of climate change now, today. Core to unlocking that funding is the adoption of new narratives and value propositions that align with broader incentives.
Unfortunately, mitigation continues to fall short. Last year we officially surpassed the threshold of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, with no end in sight. This is particularly true amidst the latest US policy changes and as emerging markets & their populations continue to grow. Meanwhile, climate-induced natural hazards are only worsening. For example, in 2024 the US experienced 27 natural disasters of >$1B in damage. This is a drastic increase in frequency and severity.
The 1980–2024 annual average of >$1B disasters is 9, whereas the average for the last five years (2020–2024) is 23 events.
The magnitude of damage has also increased by ~130% over the same period, now resulting in $149B in yearly costs on average. And for context, the latest figures from the LA Wildfires indicate at least $250B in total economic loss.
This is just in the US, one of the relatively safest nations from climate hazards. The world’s most vulnerable populations have been left in an increasingly precarious situation, with a trajectory toward civil unrest and migration. Especially as initiatives like the Loss and Damages fund are unable to provide anywhere near sufficient support to these nations.
We absolutely must keep pushing to finance decarbonization. However, it’s important to recognize the uphill dynamics domestically in the US, and intrinsic to global collective action. With climate mitigation not progressing quickly enough, society inversely must rely more on climate adaptation. While adaptation financing is only in the early innings, it seems inevitable that many stakeholders – corporations, governments, institutions, and investors – will begin drumming up capital that protect their/our collective interests.
Given these dynamics and the need for continued mitigation along with adaptation, 1) we should be adamant about funding dual-purpose solutions that enable both adaptation and mitigation simultaneously, and 2) by framing these solutions under the banner of adaptation and resilience rather than mitigation, there is greater potential to align with wider incentives and tap into critical sources of capital.
The Russian Doll framing
First, a quick note on word choice. “Adaptation” connotes the need to adapt, over the short and long-term, to the changing climate through a new way of daily living and functioning as a society. “Resilience” is more about our systems’ capacities to withstand various shocks as time-bound events, and then quickly rebuild. I prefer using the term adaptation because it encompasses resilience, as these shocks are increasingly becoming part of daily life. That said, I appreciate how Tailwind has combined adaptation and resilience (A&R) into a succinct definition: “products or services that prepare, prevent, respond to and/or enable recovery from climate shocks and stressors.” Thus, I refer to the packaged “adaptation and resilience (A&R)” framing throughout to best align with the industry.
We should think of this approach like a Russian doll. On the outside, these solutions can and should be packaged as adaptation and resilience. A&R evokes agency and survival, which is a more influential catalyzer than reducing emissions (mitigation). There is a need to enhance resilience for reasons that have less apparent connections to climate change, such as to bolster supply chains amidst disease outbreaks and geopolitical turmoil, or support homeland security (despite how interconnected climate impacts really are). Thus, to bridge across the political spectrum and attract financing, focusing exclusively on resilience over adaptation may be more appropriate in certain settings.
However, while they don’t need to be front and center, there are many layers of benefits underneath. The layer below resilience here is climate mitigation. In many cases there are also inherent clean air & water benefits, as well as biodiversity gains (especially with nature-based solutions) and other co-benefits. In this analogy, the size of the doll is irrelevant to their actual impact - it’s merely to illustrate how all of these value propositions can often be packaged into one project, without needing to elaborate on each of them with the same emphasis.
So, what are some of these Russian Doll, multi-purpose solutions that we should be funding, and how do they manifest the various layers? Particularly of interest are multifaceted nature-based solutions like regenerative agriculture, coastal conservation, and forest & grassland management – which have been overly reliant on voluntary carbon crediting and mitigation motivation, yet collectively must triple their current financing by 2030. Below are some of these nature-based pathways in detail:
Regenerative (aka Resilient) agriculture
Increased frequency and severity of droughts, combined with extreme precipitation events, heat waves, temperature swings, and more pests and fungus continues to threaten our food supply. However, there are preventative measures that can be taken.
One of which is adopting regenerative agricultural practices. To date, regenerative is largely associated with “climate-smart” farming and mitigation. But the soil health benefits that inherently come with these practices significantly bolsters food supply chain resilience:
All-around healthier plants, replete with proper nutrient balance through crop rotations, cover cropping, and managed grazing, are primed to have stronger yields. They also have a greater shot at defeating withstanding drought, extreme heat, and diseases. Plus, those nutrients make their way into us humans down the line, which has important ramifications for our health.
With drought specifically, building healthier soil structures improves soil’s ability to absorb and retain water, thereby mitigating drought conditions. Healthy soils also encourage deeper root growth, allowing plants to access water from deeper soil strata. Adopting cover crops and planting perennials also prevents erosion and water/nutrient runoff.
Incorporating diversified agroforestry and silvopasture into crop systems can diversify and increase farmer revenue (via timber and new crop varieties), while providing shade to livestock.
Supply chain resilience marks a fundamental reason for corporations (and governments) to finance a transition to regenerative agriculture: enabling stability of their product and therefore bottom lines. It just so happens these practices also have the potential to sequester bounties of carbon into soils as organic and inorganic matter, to the tune of 2-5 gigatons of CO2 per year, in addition to all of the carbon stored in trees with agroforestry. And regenerative practices greatly enhance biodiversity through the conservation and restoration of habitats for critical species.
Unfortunately, there is a long way to go in adopting regen ag. Out of 900 million acres of farmland and rangeland in the US, only 5.1 million acres (~0.5%) are certified as regenerative. There have been promising commitments from corporations like General Mills, Pepsi, Cargill, Walmart, but it will require vastly more capital and stakeholders to achieve the transition we need.
Providing growers with finance for the transition from conventional to regenerative practices is paramount, given the risks they take on during this period. Yields often drop temporarily, labor costs increase, and without access to standard forms of insurance, growers’ livelihoods can be significantly impacted for several years before the practices produce higher returns & ensure more stable supply. This is where private and philanthropic financing should be coming together, especially given the mutually aligned interests. Organizations like Mad Capital, Steward, Fractal, and Agroforestry Partners are prime examples of the types of initiatives to finance.
There are other important dual-threat food system solutions beyond regenerative agriculture. For example, 1) breeding new heat, drought, and salt-tolerant crops and 2) alternative protein production offers incredible potential of stable supply while preventing further land use change. That said, there is much to be figured out still as these pathways continue advancing, and they are not quite at the point of slotting into supply chains and providing resilience today.
Coastal ecosystem conservation
Over 3 billion people rely on thriving and safe blue carbon ecosystems like mangroves and wetlands, seagrasses, tidal marshes, and coral reefs for their wellbeing. However, the intrinsic coastal resilience capabilities these ecosystems manifest is not discussed nearly enough: their ability to reduce damages from flooding, erosion and storm surges is estimated to be over $65 billion per year.
These ecosystems also happen to be some of the most important methods of climate mitigation we have available. It’s been estimated that 11.5 billion tons of carbon (or ~42 gigatons of potential CO2) is stored by blue carbon ecosystems worldwide. Mangroves sequester between 6–8 tons of CO2 equivalent per hectare annually, which is two to four times more carbon than mature tropical forests. Seagrasses are close behind, pulling up to twice as much carbon than terrestrial forests per hectare.
Moreover, it’s known that these blue carbon ecosystems also provide essential biodiversity benefits, in addition to filtering pollutants and contaminants from the water, and food security via thriving fish populations for coastal villages across the world.
Blue carbon projects have faced a particularly high difficulty in attracting funding. Neal Spackman writes in his important article on blue carbon, “it costs way too much to restore [mangroves and] seagrasses compared to the potential carbon revenues to make blue carbon a viable instrument for funding that restoration work.” Insufficient streams of conservation finance have had devastating impacts: in the last 50 years, between 30-50% of mangroves have been lost, and continue to degrade at a rate of 2% each year, mainly due to deforestation for coastal development.
Therefore, a greater ability to pin their benefits on coastal community protection may be what’s needed to reverse the trend. Despite limited funding from the public domain for this work so far and uneconomical carbon finance pricing in the voluntary market, it will be absolutely critical for more than purely philanthropic dollars to do this at the scale needed. Hopefully corporations will find new ways to step in as they seek to shore up their coastal assets where relevant. Funding ecosystem restoration work, especially in coastal communities, is an essential insurance policy against the billions countries big and small will otherwise be forced to pay upon the next wave of tropical storms, monsoons, and hurricanes. We’ve just seen our first “debt-for-climate resilience” refinancing in Barbados, which is a fortunate sign. But we need much, much more.
Forest and grassland management
Wildfires are a bit of the inverse situation: most people associate wildfire prevention with the need for resilience, rather than climate mitigation purposes. And rightfully so. ~99 million people (⅓ of the U.S. population) live in "wildland-urban interfaces” (WUIs), but most don’t know what the ‘interface’ is nor the extreme dangers it poses.
In a recent hearing, Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator of Rhode Island aptly remarked, “the climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs. It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.” Since 2018, almost 2 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped (“nonrenewed”), and the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more in 200 counties. The potential for cascading economic impacts from this home insurance crisis is increasingly becoming quite real.
At the same time, the carbon emissions released from major wildfires in the past few years are staggering: in 2021, wildfires across North America and Eurasia’s boreal forests released approximately 1.76 gigatonnes of CO₂. For context, all of global aviation contributes approximately 1.28 gigatonnes of CO₂ annually. This seems to be a pattern nearly each year: the 2019-20 Australian bushfires released ~715 million tonnes of CO₂, and the 2023 Canadian wildfires resulted in 640 million tonnes of CO₂ escaping into the atmosphere.
Particularly frustrating is that wildfires’ spread and destruction are partially preventable. Wildland fuel treatments across forests and grasslands, such as tree thinning and prescribed/cultural burns, protect WUI communities from wildfire, while sharply decreasing the magnitude of emissions that may be released. In fact, just last week the folks at Vibrant Planet, National Forest Foundation, and Blue Forest released a study demonstrating that implementing forest thinning and prescribed burns can demonstrate an average increase of 35 tCO₂e per acre in avoided emissions and carbon storage.
Unfortunately, it has been difficult to unlock and effectively allocate sufficient funding across federal, state, and municipal governments to finance and enable wide-scale preventative treatments. And there is potential for additional set backs this year as the US Forest Service cuts its budget and headcount in 2025.
Thus, this is a call for more private climate mitigation finance to pour into wildfire prevention. It’s essential to finance market-enabling solutions to drum up the bioeconomy and woody biomass utilization. Building markets for the biomass that comes from fuel treatments opens up new opportunities to finance these treatments, without needing to rely on public funding. There are also critical technologies enabling treatments through the use of satellites, AI, and robotics that need additional private and philanthropic capital to be brought to and implemented with WUI communities amidst dwindling municipal budgets.
Conclusion
There are undoubtedly more of these examples out there, and more to come in the near future. We need to finance both adaptation and mitigation, and by leveraging the umbrella benefits of adaptation & resilience, we have a greater chance to finance the climate solutions we desperately need.
This is not to say we shouldn’t fund mitigation solutions that don’t also enable A&R. We must continue directing resources to critical “pure play” decarbonization technologies across all sectors. That said, those mitigation solutions that happen to provide A&R benefits are in a relatively strong position for funding from a broader range of stakeholders and sources. Moreover, a number of adaptation solutions, including some that address water usage & sanitation, risk forecasting, and infrastructure hardening, may not provide substantive mitigation - these are still critical to fund too.
Obviously just re-classifying a solution or project as A&R doesn’t automatically bring it funding. There are many factors at play across policy priorities, budgeting, macro economics, and more – not to mention fundamental project-level variables and criteria that must be achieved. However, shifting the value proposition to align with a greater range of interests and incentives, via A&R, should lead to more of the funding into solutions that we need to see.
Those with capital (investors, philanthropies, large nonprofits) need to continue refining what they prioritize financing in order to encompass adaptation alongside mitigation. Third Sphere and Tailwind have done a tremendous job cataloging adaptation pathways and highlight what exactly we should be building/supporting.
Given these dynamics, it is essential for climate-focused startups that enable these adaptation solutions to better understand how they can leverage this framing to attract capital and get deployed. According to Tailwind, 30% of all climate tech startups are dual-purpose mitigation and adaptation, and 42% of climate tech startups have adaptation benefits, even if adaptation is not their primary focus. The solutions enabling A&R (and other co-benefits) by their very nature are well positioned in the coming years. Those that have less direct ties to A&R will likely begin to a) develop stronger ties through their product & service offering and/or b) find creative ways to illustrate how their existing offering is one of A&R as well.