BCG-WEF Project: Global Business Adaptation Alliance

The Resilience Opportunity: Unlocking Climate Adaptation Through Public-Private Collaboration

Climate adaptation and resilience (A&R) are becoming strategic priorities across the public and private sectors. Yet despite growing awareness of the need to protect people, infrastructure, and economies, investment levels remain below what is required. Public funding alone cannot meet the scale of demand, particularly for large, shared-risk infrastructure, making private sector engagement not just beneficial, but essential.

Recent market analysis estimates that adaptation will represent a trillion-dollar annual investment opportunity by 2050. Within this, $300 billion to $500 billion per year will be needed to deliver large-scale A&R infrastructure, such as flood protection systems, drought mitigation, and urban resilience networks, where public-private collaboration offers the most effective and efficient path forward.

Research by the World Economic Forum and BCG presents a blueprint for unlocking the full potential of public-private collaboration in A&R. It introduces six archetypes that define practical roles for private sector participation in scaling climate resilience.

• Archetype 1: Joint Protection for Own Operations
  Companies co-invest in adaptation infrastructure (flood barriers, heat mitigation) or services (such as workforce training) that directly protects their physical assets, facilities, or workforce to enhance business and operational resilience.
• Archetype 2: Joint Investment in Supply Chain Resilience
  Private actors support adaptation measures that secure key suppliers, logistics infrastructure, or distribution channels. For example, agri-food companies invest in upstream cocoa sourcing.
• Archetype 3: Revenue Stream from Adaptation Benefits
  Businesses deliver services or infrastructure with adaptation benefits that have a direct customer or payment mechanism, such as payment for ecosystem services, insurance tied to resilient assets, or usage-based fees for resilient infrastructure.
• Archetype 4: Monetization of Co-Benefits
  Adaptation actions generate marketable environmental or social outcomes as co-benefits—carbon credits, sustainable agriculture products, biodiversity tourism—or offer new revenue streams for developers.
• Archetype 5: Asset Value Uplift from Adaptation
  Investments in adaptation create or raise the long-term value of land, real estate, tourism zones, or commercial developments by improving environmental conditions, safety, or livability.
• Archetype 6: Collaboration for Diffused Economic Benefits
  Private sector participates in adaptation initiatives that deliver broad societal and economic resilience, such as maintaining market stability, protecting livelihoods, or enhancing basic services.

The research also identified key levers to make adaptation investable: defining viable revenue models, aggregating small projects into scalable platforms, and managing risk-return expectations among diverse stakeholders. Real-world case studies—including Malaysia’s SMART Tunnel and RISCO’s nature-based restoration model—illustrate how adaptation projects can be viable, scalable, and impactful when designed effectively.

To advance this urgent agenda, public and private sector leaders can work together to identify suitable entry points, align on shared objectives, and co-design and co-develop projects that integrate commercial and resilience value. With structured design and public-private collaboration, climate adaptation can become a scalable, investable pillar of the global climate response.

Why Adaptation Through Water—and Private-Sector Partnership—Is the Answer to Managing Southeast Asia’s Climate Change Impacts

Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to climate change. The incidence and magnitude of catastrophic floods, drought, wildfire, and heat waves are worsening. The region’s geography, topography, and large population make the costs of these impacts prohibitive. Each year, flooding and extreme weather together cause $400 billion to $650 billion in infrastructure damage, and harm everything from crop yields and fisheries production to hydroelectric power. The impacts on human health, safety, and livelihoods and on the region’s resources and economies are inordinately high.

These climate-induced effects are overwhelmingly water-related. Water, of course, underpins virtually every human and natural system. As both a catalyst to the healthy functioning of these systems and an agent of harm through its excess, scarcity, and pollution, water is naturally suited to be at the center of climate change adaptation efforts in the region.

Adaptation Through Water Is a Natural

Water adaptation and resilience efforts—or Adaptation through Water (AtW)—involve promoting solutions that influence the natural or engineered water cycle to minimize the negative impacts of climate change. These solutions include harnessing nature’s power, expanding water infrastructure, using water more efficiently and productively, and improving water governance. AtW actions span every major use of water: agriculture, municipal systems, energy, industry, and the environment.

Significant investments will be needed for adaptation. According to research by the World Economic Forum and BCG, fortifying the region’s adaptation and resilience to the various types of flooding will take an investment of roughly $13 billion by 2030. Funding these efforts, and in a timely way, is far beyond government’s capacity.

AtW calls for private-sector partnership. Businesses (and their suppliers) that depend on water have a stake in safeguarding its supply and ensuring business continuity when crisis strikes. Investors and solution developers can reap opportunity by creating water adaptation products and strategies, including funding mechanisms.

The World Economic Forum and BCG highlight five projects that embody this approach in managing water challenges. A nature-based strategy for flood resilience, for example, shows how restoring entire river basins, wetlands, and forests upstream can prevent extreme flood events downstream. This project is being funded through institutional capital—patient capital that allows for long-term, scalable investment. Among the other approaches highlighted in the report are technologies and methods for wastewater reuse, including circularity and waste-to-energy solutions; and the use of cloud-based AI and satellite data to enhance national drought policy development.

Beyond the opportunities for product developers, AtW creates opportunities for banks and investors to innovate financing mechanisms, such as nature-based flood resilience bonds, nature-as-a-service contracts (which help businesses reduce their risk exposure), blended financing vehicles, and carbon credits.

Four Opportunities for Private-Sector Action

A simple, sector-agnostic framework pinpoints four solution areas through which business can act to achieve efficiencies, mitigate risks, safeguard supply chains, and seize economic opportunity.

• Flood damage reduction
• Water optimization and circularity
• Financing AtW
• Water and nature innovation

This framework can be used as a model to drive public-private collaboration on AtW. Potential opportunity becomes a powerful lever for sparking innovation and implementing solutions that can effectively accelerate and scale climate change adaptation throughout Southeast Asia.