How can effective partnerships be designed and delivered to close the adaptation gap?

John Haley addressing the “COP26 Ministerial Dialogue on Adaptation Action” on 8 November.

Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen

Thank you for the invitation to speak about Adaptation partnerships. Following years of sustained effort, climate resilience and finance are experiencing real breakthroughs. The climate resilience emergency is driving shared realities and mindsets, helping us adapt faster and at the scale required.

We have seen major announcements in Glasgow from public-private groups including the Insurance Development Forum and the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance, as well as the multi-stakeholder Global Resilience Index Initiative, launching as I speak.

At the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit we launched the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment (CCRI). CCRI’s mission is to deliver practical solutions for better pricing of physical climate risks in investment decision-making. CCRI’s solutions cover two critical areas of decision-making: national planning - or systemic resilience - and asset design & structuring.

Over these last two years an ever-growing global coalition of Governments, civil engineers, investors, climate analysts and ratings agencies are working together to crack the code.

Today we launch two important solutions:

• First, a national investment prioritization tool in Jamaica, in partnership with the Government of Jamaica, the UK government, the Green Climate Fund and the University of Oxford. This tool will inform national adaptation plans by guiding governments to the most efficient investments, protecting national value – social, biodiversity and economic. We plan to expand use of this tool to many other countries over the coming year.
• Second, we move our attention from the regional scale to the bridge, the road or the hospital. With collaboration between 27 public, private and academic institutions the Physical Climate Risk Assessment Methodology integrates resilience into cash flows.

The CCRI has also initiated its capital piloting phase, which will result in the CCRI’s League of Investment Funds for Resilience.

This series of investment vehicles will apply CCRI solutions towards resilient investments across critical regions, and is committed to raising at least USD 5bn by COP27.

Here in Scotland, 245 years ago Adam Smith introduced the invisible hand that shapes the wealth of nations. Now, through systemwide partnership, we forge the tools it needs to protect all of us in the climate decades ahead.

Thank you