We are working to identify climate-smart finance for decision-makers at all levels.

Resilience Intel is a major technical outcome of the Acceleration Dialogues, which began in October 2015, in the run-up to the COP21 climate negotiations, where the Paris Agreement was adopted. Resilience Intel is also an implementation strategy for the COP22 Climate Finance Pathway, agreed as a major outcome of the 2nd Biennial High-level Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Finance [PDF], held during the COP22 in Marrakech.

One of the core elements of the COP22 climate finance work relates to Adaptation Metrics, or measuring the “invisible value” of spending that produces as its major benefit a reduction in future risk, vulnerability or damage. Resilience Intel uses “resilience” to encompass:

  1. hidden structural investment / risk reduction value;
  2. macrocritical resilience;
  3. progress toward a robust Paris-compliant climate-smart economy.

The principles and action laid out in the Resilience Intel Charter are implemented through several areas of work:

  1. Aggregation of overall finance realigned with climate-smart priorities and practices;
  2. Briefs on fiscal resilience, sustainable development spending, and the transition to climate-neutral economies;
  3. Detailing of areas of action, like the people-centered Reinventing Prosperity approach to building back better;
  4. Developing a multi-system, all-sector comparative Resilience Value financial metric (outlined below);
  5. Networking Earth science data systems into financial data systems.

The COP22 Presidency joined Citizens’ Climate and Geoversiv to introduce the Resilience Intel initiative, on the Finance Day at COP23.

From left to right: Renat Heuberger, CEO of the South Pole Group, Joseph Robertson, CCE Global Strategy Director, and Siham Ayad, lead climate finance advisor to the COP22 Presidency, present Resilience Intel at a press event during the COP23 in Bonn.

The purpose of the Aggregation segment of Resilience Intel work is to provide a light-touch analysis to parse any kind of spending into good / bad / neutral and then add up all of the good. This allows for breaking any investment, budget, or activity into these three categories, to identify hidden climate-action money across the whole economy.

Any given dollar, euro, yuan, or sol can be graded as one of the following:

  • Resilience Value Positive: RV+ (RVP)
  • Resilience Value Stable: RV= (RVS)
  • Resilience Value Negative: RV- (RVN)
Click here to learn how the Resilience Intel logo tells the story of our mission.

The grading system itself must learn and evolve, as both the overall landscape of climate action and the diversity and intensity of climate impacts gather momentum of their own. We project that, over time, achieving a “stable” RV rating will still require an increase in overall climate resilience qualification.

Investors, entrepreneurs and decision-makers, at all levels, everywhere, need actionable insights to compete in a new economy that values climate solvency as a basic right and a structural principle for the effective operation of legal and economic systems. “Resilience intelligence” includes active and operationalized understanding of how to safeguard and expand natural capital.

  • A resilience deficit is an erosion of sovereignty—for individuals, for enterprise, and for the state in its obligation to define and uphold the rule of law.
  • Investments that carry a resilience deficit will be disfavored by the wider day-to-day market for finance, globally.
  • Because investment in climate-negative finance degrades value elsewhere, it undermines everyone’s leverage for making smart, high-return investments.
  • While some speculators will seek to capitalize on volatility, the wider market interest to marginalize such investments will outweigh the value of any such risk-taking.

Resilience Intel aims to empower climate-smart financial decision-making that leverages these emerging macroeconomic imperatives:

  • The ability to perform while generating zero external harm, and to cooperate sustainably with partners at all levels, will be a higher priority than the state-funded market distortion that allowed destructive, polluting practices to dominate the old industrial economy.
  • As the transition to a climate-resilient world economy speeds ahead, every actor, at every level, can look to a future in which one’s own transition trajectory is either optimal or suboptimal. Suboptimal means converging and compounding risk could become unmanageable.
  • The optimal transition trajectory for most actors remains fairly opaque or elusive, due to the lack of visibility of the climate-smart qualification of any given dollar of planned investment. Getting ahead of the curve is the best way to secure future value.

Founding Partners

The Kingdom of Morocco, acting as a party to the UNFCCC, co-convened the Paris Working Dialogue on Resilience Intel, and is an ongoing partner in connecting this effort to the implementation of the COP22 Climate Finance Pathway and the Marrakech Pledge for Fostering Green Capital Markets in Africa. Lead partners are Citizens’ Climate International and Geoversiv, working with affiliated and partner networks.

The Principles for Reinventing Prosperity

As the COVID-19 pandemic emergency took over the world, in 2020, subjecting millions to illness and death, shutting down whole economies, and necessitating unprecedented emergency relief spending, we joined a series of discussions with local stakeholders around the world. Given the deep and pervasive human impact of the pandemic shock, we co-created the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity, as a people-centered, holistic build-back-better strategy, to ensure resilience becomes the baseline for planning and investment, and shared sustainable prosperity the core goal.