The Resilience Opportunity Unlocking Climate Resilience through Public Private Collaboration 2025

Introduction Recent extreme weather events have once again underscored the intensifying impacts of climate change and the urgent need to scale resilience efforts globally. In July 2025, central Texas experienced catastrophic flash floods, with the Guadalupe River rising nearly 30 feet in a few hours. The deluge overwhelmed local infrastructure and claimed more than 100 lives.2 At the same time, Western Europe faced its warmest June on record, with temperatures soaring above 40°C and peaking at 46°C in parts of Spain and Portugal.3 These events are not isolated shocks – they reflect a broader pattern of escalating physical climate risks that are increasingly material to economies, communities and ecosystems. Recent scientific assessments also indicate that adaptation becomes more difficult and less effective as warming intensifies, making early and coordinated investment more critical.4 Yet, alongside these rising risks lies a growing strategic opportunity – the chance to build climate resilience as a new frontier of value creation. For many companies, capturing this opportunity will require looking beyond their own operations, as the benefits often extend past traditional business boundaries. Large-scale, system-wide resilience often depends on collaboration, particularly with public actors, to align mutual interests and deliver shared resilience outcomes. Unlike mitigation, where revenue models are often more direct, investment in climate adaptation and resilience faces structural barriers. Many resilience projects protect public goods, span multiple sectors or yield co-benefits that fall outside a single entity’s balance sheet. Traditional private investment frameworks, built around short payback periods and clearly attributable returns, struggle to accommodate this complexity. As a result, while the case for climate resilience is clear, scalable investment models remain elusive. Unlocking meaningful private-sector participation will require new thinking – both in how projects are designed and how risk, returns and responsibilities are shared between public and private actors. This paper aims to accelerate that collaboration. It provides a market-oriented perspective on climate resilience, identifying practical archetypes for private- sector participation and unpacking the levers required to design viable collaborations. The goal is to help unlock private capital and capabilities in ways that generate lasting value for both business and society.Resilience is rising on the global agenda, presenting an urgent but untapped opportunity for private-sector action. Unlocking meaningful private- sector participation will require new thinking – both in how projects are designed and how risk, returns and responsibilities are shared between public and private actors. The Resilience Opportunity: Unlocking Climate Resilience through Public-Private Collaboration 5