Justifying the Resilience Transition

One of the oldest, most regular questions I get from adaptation professionals is how to communicate the difference between adaptation and resilience relative to what institutions are already doing. That’s a fair question, and one that is often hard to respond to with a short and easy answer.

A lot of people go straight to the fear — what are you at risk of losing or failing with? Are you ready for a disaster? Are you doing enough to avoid one? Indeed, climate-related risks are real and important. Perhaps the strongest counterargument is a response that some de-risking process already exists. For a company, that might be within an ESG framework. For an institution that develops or funds projects, there might be a formal and comprehensive risk assessment process. The natural rejoinder from someone you’re trying to connect with is to say, “Can we just add a few climate items to the existing de-risking list?”

But de-risking is inherently dissatisfying once you have quaffed deeply from the cup of resilience. De-risking is not resilience. Resilience is arguably an even higher standard than adaptation. To me and many of you, I’m sure, resilience aims to address the really big impacts that all of us know are in process now and beginning to feel palpable and close. Incremental adaptation or basic de-risking feels insufficient and potentially even like a distraction.

I would date the significant reorientation in this space to a position paper from the Asian Development Bank that published in 2020 by Paul Watkiss, Robert Wilby, and Charles Rodgers, but surely people were thinking about these contrasting issues at the same time. In this paper, Watkiss and colleagues distinguish between projects whose main purpose is adaptation and resilience with projects that need to be climate-proofed. The distinction is very important. De-risking is quite sufficient for most projects — we can look at a few major, very broad climate parameters, which should help ensure that they can continue to operate and function with some incremental change. We can make these projects robust to these limited parameters, and if possible add some flexibility elements. Clearly the standard is lower for these projects; climate proofing should ensure that they work over the short and medium term.

The higher standard for adaptation and resilience is quite different from de-risking. Although the author team did not really refer to this issue, I believe they are calling for the emergence of a new development and investment sector for resilience. And resilience requires more justification, preparation, and analysis. In many cases, we might want to track these additional expenses under a climate finance label or add them in a policy framework actions under “transparency” or through an NDC or NAP. Resilience is really more about addressing the uncertainty of a wide range of impacts and riding the wave of change. Resilience looks beyond a handful of high-confidence climate impacts to big range of what might and could happen. Resilience, in short, addresses the overriding problem of deep climatic transformation. If we are truly ambitious, resilience is also about prosperity despite climate change, not simply continuity of function, status, or income.

Circling back to my opening comment, our efforts to “sell,” explain, and justify adaptation and resilience should also distinguish between these two levels of effort. 

My personal experience over the past few months is that the reorientation to resilience over and beyond de-risking is both well advanced and proceeding rapidly. You will not see the distinction listed in formal institutional guidance (yet), but I have heard personally from influential members of a variety of private, investment, and public institutions over the past few weeks that they are moving rapidly past de-risking to full resilience. I think a lot of institutions will be surprised by the depth and speed of the transition. But resilience is clearly winning. And that is important for those of us in water, because resilience is really about water resilience.

The question for you is: are you implementing water resilience yet, or are you still de-risking?

Join me on the journey.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA