Therefore, a key underlying question that I was keen to explore within COP29 discussions was to determine how much is ‘resilience’ actually an achievable future, or just an over-ambitious and vague buzzword?
Resilience as a Buzzword
There were some occasions of ‘resilience’ being used in COP29 panel titles, and yet never being explicitly discussed during the panels. I excitedly tuned into a talk which said that they would be discussing strategies to improve climate resilience and reduce vulnerability of cities, only to find that ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’ was never explicitly mentioned in the content of the talk. In addition, many talks discussed how their adaptation strategies were designed to help improve ‘social resilience’, and yet never explicitly explained how their strategy would practically improve resilience.
Several of the panels specifically discussed this issue of the lack of common language surrounding climate resilience, risk and adaptation. Many conversations around climate resilience continue to focus on climate risk (which considers the physical vulnerability and exposure of a community to that threat), rather than how a community will respond to that threat. This was highlighted as a significant issue for trying to develop cross-sector partnerships (such as between public policy, law, equity firms, and non-governmental organisations), as we are not at the point where we have common language to unify the conversation.
Resilience as an Achievable Future
Once common language is identified for what a sector is trying to achieve with ‘resilience’, it is important to shift from theory to practice. When defining and measuring resilience, there are three important steps that need to be taken:
- Assess the baseline state of the chosen area, including who is vulnerable to climate threats, and what their exposure to the threat is.
- Consider what interventions are needed to help increase the ability of populations to plan, prepare, respond and recover from climate threats. This can include improving natural capital (through implementing nature-based adaptive systems designed which are designed to fit future climate risks), improving resilient infrastructure (such as protecting homes and businesses) and improving socio-economic systems, to ensure residents have the capacity and ability to respond in the face of a climate threat.
- Assess the effect of those interventions on increasing resilience, and the subsequent impact this has on creating an optimal future system.
These steps of resilience were discussed across many spatial scales, with some talks considering how their country as a nation can be resilient, which others considering how individual communities can build their climate resilience.
The Role of Finance in Improving Resilience
One key method to assess if a place is resilient is through the use of resilience indexes – which aim to quantify how different characteristics of a place (such as age, income, gender, mobility, housing) shape a place’s resilience. Many discussions around COP29 focused on this, to consider the best practices for how a country or community can effectively quantify their resilience. This included the European Commission announcing their new project of ‘Pathways 2 Resilience’, that aims to quantify and measure climate resilience of cities within Europe.
Through using these indexes to identify what parts of an area are the least climate resilient, this enables finance to be directed towards those areas that need it the most. Indexes can be used to improve transparency and accountability for investors, in order for them to understand where and why their investment is going to a particular area.
Many of the COP29 discussions focused on this for developing countries, to discuss how they can unlock the finance needed to become climate resilient. Several solutions were proposed – such as the development of a new resilience and vulnerability framework by the University of Malta, to allocate funds to Small Island Developing States (rather than the use of Gross National Income as an indicator of resilience). In addition, there are global efforts under the UAE Belém work programme to create a new framework for Global Climate Resilience, involving the use of indicators to track adaptation and resilience. This work will be ongoing until the next COP in 2025.
Resilience is very costly to achieve – and often you only see returns from investment into resilience infrastructure once a climate disaster has occurred. Yet, a network view of resilience is needed – whereby the focus is not just on assets, but also on how a community’s wellbeing can be futureproofed in the event of a climate threat. This presents a key challenge for upcoming work on climate resilience – to ensure that funding is focusing on both protecting key infrastructural assets, as well as helping the wellbeing of individuals.
Is Climate Resilience an Achievable Future?
Whilst some of the COP29 discussions considered ‘resilience’ as a buzzword, some tangible progress towards resilience was made through practical discussions around how to define, measure, and finance resilience. Many solutions were proposed to help both developed and developing countries become more resilient, yet it is clear that further work needs to be done to unify sectors with a common language around resilience, and ensure that finance is going to those areas which need it the most. Further COP29 discussions around the New Collective Quantified Goal will play a key part of this, to improve the accessibility of funds for those nations who need it the most.