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, and much harder one, is causal evidence that a given investment produced a given financial outcome. That second problem will not be solved soon with the evidence base we have. But enumerating the variables, and showing how they played out at specific companies, gives 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.
The Lab builds on projects already running across the Center. These are the closest neighbors.
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.
Three independent efforts we read, contribute to, and take part in. None is a Columbia publication or programme.
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.
Built from corporate disclosures, company press releases, 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. Three are planned for New York Climate Week 2026, listed here in date order.
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.
Pricing Resilience Investments: Building the Evidence Base for a Broader Market
As climate-related risks grow, so does the need to invest in making communities, infrastructure, and economies more resilient. One challenge continues to constrain the market: how investors can more consistently identify, measure, and price the financial value of resilience. The roundtable brings a select group of investors, asset managers, issuers, and experts together around that question.
The first resilience-labeled issuances have begun to come to market under emerging resilience taxonomies, and a small number of issuers and asset managers are starting to build resilience into allocation decisions. Volumes remain thin, and the pricing question sits underneath all of it.
The discussion explores emerging approaches to assessing resilience-related investments, the evidence needed to support a broader market, and opportunities to advance investment across public and private markets. Participants will also help identify priorities for further research and shape the agenda for a broader resilience and adaptation investment event planned for the first half of 2027.
A breakfast roundtable 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, commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank and supported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 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. In Honduras, every dollar invested ahead of drought returned $1.69 in avoided fiscal costs, counting both the emergency spending averted and the premium governments paid to finance disasters after the fact. The session asks how development banks can finance anticipatory action without adding to the fiscal burden of the governments that need it.
Sessions convened by others where the Lab takes part rather than hosts.
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.
Papers, briefs, and commentary from the Lab.
[Publication list to come. Suggested pattern, matching the NCDP library: title, authors, outlet, date, and a one-line description, filterable by year and type. Worth deciding early whether Disaster Capitalist pieces are listed here or kept separate.]
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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