The Resilience Opportunity Unlocking Climate Resilience through Public Private Collaboration 2025

Unlocking private-sector archetypes in public- private collaboration – particularly for large- scale, shared-resilience infrastructure – requires a fundamental shift in how projects are structured. While climate adaptation and resilience projects are often justified by their social or environmental benefits, they can also offer a credible investment proposition to mobilize private capital at scale. This means going beyond traditional grant or public- led delivery models and developing mechanisms that allow private actors to capture value and manage risk. There are three essential strategic levers: defining the revenue model, matching project scales for engagement and managing risk-return expectations. 1 Define the revenue model One of the core barriers for private-sector engagement is that most climate adaptation and resilience projects do not generate direct user fees or tradable assets. However, this does not mean they lack economic value. The first lever is to rethink how resilience value is captured and translated into investable returns, potentially through stacking various commercial return-oriented archetypes. Several pathways are emerging. In select cases, performance-based payments tied to resilience outcomes, such as reduced flood losses or service continuity, can offer structured returns to private investors through public contracts, donor support or insurance-linked instruments, as indicated in archetype 3. Another opportunity is to integrate with archetype 4 to monetize co-benefits, such as carbon credits or byproducts. For example, flood buffer wetland restoration projects could issue high-quality carbon credits for industrial players to offset their emissions, while coastal mangrove restoration could integrate with sustainable aquaculture to enhance the economic value realization. In addition, climate adaptation and resilience projects can be bundled with other revenue- generating models such as large infrastructure, urban development projects or other business models with steady revenue streams (e.g. transit corridors, housing or commercial districts). While still relatively uncommon in current markets, the potential for asset value uplift in archetype 5 could be harnessed where appropriate. This includes land value appreciation from resilience- focused redevelopment in flood-prone areas, coastal protection efforts with land reclamation or increased real estate value driven by well-integrated resilience features in climate-vulnerable zones.These approaches require climate resilience to be framed not just as a cost, but as a value multiplier. By embedding climate resilience within broader commercial systems and explicitly linking it to economic performance, project developers and public agencies can expand the range of viable revenue models available to the private sector. This would convert a purely protection- based climate resilience project (e.g. in archetypes 1 and 2) into a revenue-generating business (e.g. in archetypes 3, 4 or 5). 2 Match project scales for private sector thresholds The scale of climate adaptation and resilience projects plays a critical role in determining commercial viability. Many interventions, such as micro-dams, decentralized water systems or community-level irrigation upgrades, are highly effective locally, but too small or fragmented to attract private investment on their own. From an investment perspective, these projects often fall below the minimum ticket size that institutional investors, infrastructure funds or corporate capital teams can justify. To bridge this gap, public and development actors can explore ways to aggregate or integrate smaller interventions into larger investment platforms. This could include bundling projects by geography (e.g. regional watershed initiatives), by theme (e.g. urban cooling networks), by industry (e.g. climate-proofing supply chains) or even by different archetypes with shared interests. When grouped under a unified framework, with common standards, shared procurement, and coordinated governance and oversight, these projects can reach the scale required to unlock financing while retaining resilience impact. Such structuring not only improves visibility for investors but also allows for more efficient deployment of financing mechanisms, performance- based payments and long-term operations. In doing so, it expands the universe of climate adaptation and resilience projects that can transition from public programming to investable infrastructure. 3 Manage risk-return expectations for different stakeholders A core barrier to scaling private investment in climate resilience is the mismatch in risk-return expectations across a diverse set of stakeholders. Many climate adaptation and resilience projects 4.1 Three levers for unlocking scalable climate resilience collaborations Climate resilience projects can be bundled with other revenue- generating models such as large infrastructure, urban development projects or other business models with steady revenue streams. The Resilience Opportunity: Unlocking Climate Resilience through Public-Private Collaboration 17