Beyond COPs: Building the Road to Resilience

The conversation about climate and sustainability has shifted a great deal in the last few years, from what we need to do to achieve 2050 science-based targets and keep average warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, to how we more rapidly adapt to a new world in an era of AI, fiscal stress, and geopolitical disruptions.

In short, increasing resilience to disruption in the next three to five years requires a rapid recalibration of both the use of public money and private investment mechanisms that lift up local economies and build critical infrastructure. While the 31st Conference of the Parties (COP) in Antalya, Turkey, and the G20 meetings are important, these government-led mechanisms alone are clearly insufficient for meeting the scale of the challenge.

The solution, however, is not to stop having annual UN and government gatherings. We need to build parallel deployment momentum and continuity between COPs through focused investor activity.

Since COP28, the Milken Institute has convened regionally diverse groups of asset owners, asset managers, and sector experts to better understand what it will take to accelerate the deployment of private capital in resilient infrastructure and natural systems and fund net- positive climate outcomes. Our work has focused on closing two gaps that stand in the way of this acceleration: the missing implementation and pricing mechanisms that are needed to attract and deploy capital at scale and the need to shift the public discourse to a resilience- based narrative.

To further guide this critical pivot, the Institute is today releasing The Acceleration Agenda: The Road to Resilience, which calls for building out the innovation infrastructure, sustained investor activity, and dominant new narrative to promote this shift.

The key elements of the new strategy:

• Investor-led, resilience-based focus: Investors don’t need to be shy. They can lead a long-overdue reframing of climate work centered on fiscal reality, risk management, value creation, and economic resilience. Read the Institute’s recent publications, The New Investor Narrative: Discussion Document and Investing in Energy: Security, Autonomy, and the New Economics of Resilience.
• Subsidy shifting: Environmental nongovernmental organizations and development institutions need to make the fiscal case in every community that we need to shift $1 trillion in annual global public subsidies away from supporting now-mature technologies such as oil, gas, wind, solar, and nuclear and redirect scarce public funding to catalyze new technologies and markets. Recent US polling done for the Institute by the Harris Poll shows strong public support for reinvestment of public funds in energy affordability, climate resilience, and jobs and economic development. These US results echo our global findings from 2025.
• Strategic reinvestment in resilience: Directing catalytic public capital to critical areas such as mitigating physical risk, strengthening the electrical grid, and building community economic development and resilience projects offers major bang for the public’s buck. As an example, we estimate that reallocating $300 billion in global subsidies over five years—about 7 percent of support for mature technologies—would mobilize $1.2 trillion–$3.2 trillion of private capital, compared with $114 billion if spent as public money is spent today.
• Private capital and asset owner leadership: The investor community also needs to pivot quickly to find value-creation opportunities and manage new risks in the age of adaptation and AI we now live in. For example, asset owners can set expectations for their managers to share data on replicable transactions and drive new deal flow and secondary market growth through interoperable protocols. There is an opportunity for the investment community and advocates to engage more directly on what it would take for natural infrastructure to become an asset class.
• Regional investor corridors: As investment conditions change, new opportunities will arise. The key to scale here will be creating innovative regional partnerships that link sovereign investors, finance ministries, asset owners, and development banks that are aligned on specific market-creation opportunities to capture the Invisible Dividend recently identified by Alterra.
   

Making a Hard Pivot: A Five-Year Resilience and Adaptation Strategy

Calls to treat climate change as an urgent moral and environmental crisis are not winning the argument in an era of multiple crises happening on land, at sea, and in space. Be it supply-chain shifts due to hot wars, demand for critical minerals to drive electrification, or fast-growing energy demand to feed AI, business as usual on “climate action” is changing.

Yet this doesn’t have to be a Bleak House scenario.

Looking ahead, we see four major scenarios developing to shift the scale of climate-positive investment over the next five years (Figure 1). We can stay stuck in the bottom-right box below (Stranded and Struggling) or move up and across to drive new deal flow by following the clear signals that the investment community is sending. Major investors are less interested these days in projects with a perfect net-zero score. Risk management and commercial returns for resilience and sustainability projects are what will move the dial.

The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz for much of 2026 and surging AI energy demand are driving the localization of climate finance and changing investor appetites. Both institutional investors and local communities are now focused on delivering energy security and grid reliability, addressing physical and portfolio risks on their balance sheets. These are critical additional “signals” to follow to address climate change and drive community resilience.

To get there, we are offering a series of recommendations outlined in our Acceleration Agenda working paper released this week.

The Road to Resilience

We’d love to hear from you. To learn more about our scenario work and future outcome- focused convenings, please email [email protected].