Morgan Richmond & Pallavi Sherikar's Five Questions For Adaptation Finance

🔔 Editor’s Note: Apologies for the late publication of this week’s Climate Proofers episode. The next episode will be released on Tuesday as usual.

It sounds like a simple question: “What is adaptation finance?”

The answer is anything but.

Many organizations — including the UN, OECD, and national governments — try each year to tally up the dollars they claim go towards adaptation projects in the developing world. Each counts differently, however, and varies in what they consider to be in and out of scope.

The Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) wants us to move away from talking about adaptation finance as a simple numbers game. Its experts say the obsession with volumes and flows leaves out too much, and that raw dollar totals are a poor indicator of the actual effectiveness of climate-proofing measures.

In this episode, Morgan Richmond and Pallavi Sherikar — the co-leads for adaptation and resilience finance at CPI — share insights from their latest report: Adaptation & Resilience Financing in an Overshoot World, which says volume-based tracking is no longer enough.

Morgan explains that private, domestic, and state-owned enterprise spending remains elusive, and difficult to fit in the broader adaptation finance narrative. Pallavi, who previously handled adaptation finance accounting at the US State Department, explains why ‘invisible’ finance like guarantees and insurance are so important — and so hard to capture in public data.

The pair then break down the five questions for adaptation finance listed in their report, and what real progress towards answering these would look like.

For all those deep in the weeds of climate finance, this is the episode for you.

Listen by clicking the link below, or tune in via Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening!

Louie Woodall
Editor