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- Mind the Gaps: Tailwind’s New Playbook Aims to Plug Adaptation’s Capital, Demand, and Ecosystem Holes
Mind the Gaps: Tailwind’s New Playbook Aims to Plug Adaptation’s Capital, Demand, and Ecosystem Holes
The advisory and investment firm reports a shocking lack of financing for adaptation and resilience innovations
TL;DR
Tailwind Climate has published an Adaptation & Resilience Innovation Playbook which aims to scale A&R finance and entrepreneurship
The playbook flags a capital gap, demand gap, and ecosystem gap as major barriers
Despite US$1.4trn spend on A&R solutions globally, only 3% of climate tech funding supports A&R startups
Scaling up investment will require a VC rethink, and more catalytic funding
Tailwind sees A&R opportunities belonging to three buckets: Bright Spots, Hidden Gems, and Blind Spots, each with their own pros and cons for entrepreneurs and investors
Tailwind also offers recommendations for corporations, governments, and investors on growing the A&R market.
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Climate adaptation has a capital and innovation problem. Tailwind Climate has a plan to solve it.
Today, the advisory and investment firm — co-founded by Emilie Mazzacurati and Katie MacDonald — released a 112-page Adaptation & Resilience Innovation Playbook. Part state-of-the-market report on the emerging adaptation economy, part guide on scaling up finance and entrepreneurship, the playbook was written to equip would-be climate-proofers with the data and insights they need to navigate the adaptation and resilience (A&R) tech and investment landscape.
”When we started Tailwind, we looked at the market. There was a lot of innovation going on in mitigation — technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emission or remove them from the atmosphere — and almost nothing that we could find on adaptation,” says Mazzacurati, who sat for an upcoming Climate Proofers podcast.
The playbook is an attempt to even the odds with the climate mitigation world. It does so by shining a light on three “gaps” it argues are holding back adaptation: a “capital gap”, a “demand gap”, and an “ecosystem gap”.
The document builds on Tailwind’s other efforts to catalyze the A&R market. Earlier this year, Mazzacurati and MacDonald published the Tailwind Taxonomy for Adaptation and Resilience Investments, a guide to mapping A&R opportunities across eight themes and 35 sectors.
The new playbook does something different, though. By offering a wealth of data on the the evolving A&R economy — and the challenges it faces — it aims to help solutions buyers, providers, and investors turbocharge the market’s growth.

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