Shared resilience
Resilience may depend as much on the connections between systems as on the strength of any one organisation.
Building shared
resilience across Asia.
I work on how climate risk becomes institutional action and appropriate finance.
This is my working notebook: essays, ideas, field notes and reading from inside the work—what I am seeing across Asia, what I think we may be misunderstanding, and what it takes to turn frontline risk into action.
LATEST ESSAY
Funding the Conditions for Action
Philanthropy may sometimes create more value before the final solution is ready to be financed by funding evidence, institutional capability, trust, coordination and project preparation that allow other actors and other forms of capital to move.
Ideas I’m working on
All ideas →Risk changes as it travels
Climate hazards rarely remain in one sector. Heat, flooding and drought can become health, labour, infrastructure, fiscal, food or energy problems.
The ability to act is part of resilience
Information only protects people when they also have the money, authority, infrastructure and practical options needed to act.
How knowledge acquires power
Frontline knowledge matters when it can change decisions, budgets, policy and finance rather than remain inside reports and consultations.
Human capability is resilience infrastructure
Finance, technology and policy only become useful when people and institutions have the capability to do something with them.
Project formation is a climate capability
Recognised risk does not automatically become something that institutions can approve, budget for and finance.
Selected essays
All essays →HUMAN CAPABILITY
The Climate Transition May Run Out of People Before It Runs Out of Money
Capital and technology are often treated as the principal constraints on the climate transition. But implementation may increasingly depend on something slower to build: the people and institutional capability required to make those investments work.
RESILIENCE
Climate Risk Rarely Remains a Climate Problem
PHILANTHROPY
Funding the Conditions for Action
INSTITUTIONS
From Frontline Intelligence to Institutional Change
COALITIONS
Coalitions as the Unit of Action
CLIMATE FINANCE
Appropriate Capital: Stop Asking How to Attract Private Finance
What I’m reading
All reading notes →WORLD BANK
Towards Resilient and Prosperous Cities in India
The more interesting question is whether resilience can become part of ordinary urban planning before vulnerability is locked into the cities still being built.
ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK
Urban Financing Partnership Facility
The constraint may begin before capital: with the institutional capability required to turn recognised risks into projects that governments and investors can finance.
PHILANTHROPY ASIA ALLIANCE
Philanthropy as Risk Capital in Asia
Philanthropy may create unusual value by carrying uncertainty long enough for evidence, institutions and other forms of capital to emerge.
NOTES ON SHARED RESILIENCE
Trying to understand how resilience actually gets built.
Notes on how climate risk becomes institutional action, human capability, appropriate finance and scale across Asia.
Arunabha Bhattacharya 