Resilience Bonds Taxonomy Update, Adaptation Finance Deadlock in Bonn, Shake-Up at CDP, and More

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The Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) has published an updated methodology for its Resilience Taxonomy — a framework for classifying adaptation and resilience investments for debt markets. 

The Taxonomy, originally released in 2024, offers a detailed catalogue of climate-proofing investments, together with eligibility criteria and in-depth validation processes for rooting out maladaptive projects and those that do not substantially contribute to resilience or harm climate mitigation goals.  

The update follows an initial flurry of activity in the nascent adaptation bonds market. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government issued a €300mn (US$348mn) bond aligned with the Resilience Taxonomy last October, while CAF — the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean — issued one in partnership with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction in November.

The souped-up taxonomy spans 27 sectors and 69 subsectors across seven themes, with over 400 adapting measures classified as automatically eligible for inclusion in a resilience-aligned debt instrument without need for further screening. 

CBI research found only 19% of labeled green bonds carried resilience-related use of proceeds as of the end of 2022, despite these instruments having channeled over US$3.7trn to sustainable activities — underscoring the supply gap the updated taxonomy aims to address.

The Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA) used the opening of UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, last week to push governments to triple public, grant-based adaptation finance to at least US$120bn annually by 2035, describing the current shortfall as a direct threat to health sector resilience. This target is three times the US$40bn goal agreed at COP26 – one likely to be missed by rich nations – and aligns with agreements made at last year’s UN Climate Conference to scale up overall adaptation finance to this level. “Without adaptation finance, life saving action to build resilience in the health sector and in health determining sectors, such as water and sanitation, disaster planning, and food systems, will be impossible – risking malnutrition, waterborne disease, exposure to extreme weather, and lack of access to health services at the very moments they are most needed,” said GCHA Policy Lead Jess Beagley. (Down to Earth)

Three-quarters of Southeast Asia’s planned renewable energy capacity faces “severe climate exposure” by 2030, putting US$165bn in assets at stake, Zurich Insurance said Tuesday. The insurer analyzed 1,380 existing and future generation sites across ASEAN and found that a US$13bn upfront resilience investment could cut projected losses by 40% to 50% and reduce exposure by roughly US$82bn. Solar infrastructure is most at risk, with 80% of sites estimated to fall into the top two highest risk buckets measured by the company. Four hazards present the majority of risks: wind, flooding, hail, and tornadoes. (Zurich Insurance)

The European Investment Bank and the Green Climate Fund (GCF) – the world’s largest for climate solutions – have signed their first-ever financing agreement, with the GCF committing €200mn (US$232mn) to support a new Global Green Bond Initiative, which aims to channel as much as €20bn (US$23bn) in private capital for sustainable infrastructure across low- and middle-income countries. The fund, to be managed by Amundi — Europe’s largest asset manager — is targeting €3bn in direct investment to support green bond issuance, together with a technical assistance programme to build issuance capacity in partner countries, and a Green Coupon Subsidy Facility to reduce borrowing costs where market rates are prohibitively high. (European Investment Bank)

The 2027 EU-wide bank stress test will for the first time apply a dedicated climate risk module to gauge lenders’ resilience to climate transition and physical shocks that may materialize amidst a painful macroeconomic backdrop. The European Banking Authority’s draft methodology, released last week, would require banks to run a one-in-100-year riverine flood scenario across all European Economic Area countries in 2027, using flood hazard maps from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, alongside a three-year transition shock tied to carbon price spikes and sector-specific disturbances. Scope covers non-financial corporate and real estate exposures, with lenders required to recalibrate loan default parameters for flood-affected collateral. Notably, the results of the climate risk module will not affect the core stress test results, used by the regulator to weigh banks’ capital adequacy. (European Banking Authority)

The World Bank approved two financing initiatives for Morocco last Friday, including a US$400mn Climate & Risk Finance Programme designed to strengthen the country’s financial resilience against climate, disaster, and cyber risks. The climate finance tranche is specifically structured to develop cyber and disaster insurance vehicles and underwrite new ways to attract private capital for climate-resilience infrastructure projects, as well as build the capacity of Moroccan financial regulators to oversee climate risk. A special Project Preparation Facility will be created to nurture a series of infrastructure efforts across renewable energy, energy efficiency, sustainable transport, and water infrastructure. (World Bank)

The International Finance Corporation will invest up to US$15mn in the Caribbean Community Resilience Fund Debt Sub-Fund, marking the first debt fund transaction in the region for the unit of the World Bank. The vehicle, managed by Sygnus with CARICOM Development Fund, targets US$75mn, scalable to US$125mn, and will deploy capital across 13 Caribbean nations. Seventy percent will fund medium-sized enterprises, with the remainder backing resilience and sustainability projects in energy, water, agriculture and transport. (International Finance Corporation)

Kenya has become the first African country to receive loss-and-damage funding through the Santiago Network, a UN mechanism established in 2019 to provide climate-vulnerable countries with resources for addressing the consequences of extreme weather impacts. Kenya will receive $700,000 from the Switzerland-based fund to identify and support communities hit by droughts, floods, and climate-related crop failures. (Mongabay)

The Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has released a “decision-support tool” to help public finance providers gauge the quality, rather than just the quantity, of adaptation finance. The framework assesses financing efforts at the project, market, and system levels, and covers four funding types: grants, debt, equity, and risk-transfer mechanisms. The tool exposes serious imbalances in adaptation finance provision. In countries with moderate debt burdens, non-concessional debt (meaning that provided at market rates) accounts for 90% of adaptation finance, adding heavy repayment burdens on fiscally fragile governments. CPI’s tagging of adaptation finance also reveals significant shortfalls for certain sectors. Notably, only 9% of foreign aid flows to health have a climate risk focus. (Climate Policy Initiative)

UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany entered week two with adaptation finance commitments unresolved and frustration mounting over a lack of progress on how to implement previously agreed-on climate-proofing efforts.

Climate finance remains the central fault line across all negotiating tracks. Developed countries have resisted opening talks on public finance obligations, while the new Climate Finance Work Programme faces disputes over scale and sourcing that could determine whether it reaches the COP31 agenda in Antalya later this year. Japan, the EU, Canada, and Norway opposed the formalization of adaptation finance goals or tracking of adaptation finance in negotiations. 

Climate think-tank E3G says that countries are missing an opportunity to foreground adaptation in Bonn, as negotiators are mired in technicalities and uncertain on how to deliver the tripling of adaptation finance agreed at COP30 last year. Still , Ana Mulio Alvarez, Senior Policy Advisor at the organization, is optimistic progress will be made: “I believe there are enough areas of convergence among parties that with some political will and compromise we could deliver significant progress for resilience in this session,” she said.

In this final week of the Bonn talks, negotiators are being urged to clarify the climate adaptation objectives of COP31 and make progress on the Belém Adaptation Indicators, the common baseline agreed on at last year’s summit for measuring how well the world is adapting to the impacts of a warming planet.

“Adaptation should be the easiest issue on the table. No country benefits from droughts, floods or climate disasters. Yet even adaptation becomes politically difficult when finance is missing,” said Mattias Söderberg, Global Climate Lead at charity DanChurchAid.

An analysis by the Guardian finds 22 of the 39 countries facing US entry restrictions under the Trump administration rank in the most climate-vulnerable quarter globally, per the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative. The administration has also moved to terminate temporary protected status for Honduras, Haiti, Syria and other high-risk countries. The UN estimates climate disasters have displaced 250 million people over the past decade, with 30 million internal displacements in 2025 alone. (The Guardian)

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has introduced a Long-Term Solvency Planning Regulation requiring carriers operating in the state to submit forward-looking estimates of how their capital cushions are likely to cope with rising physical climate risks, cybersecurity threats, and AI-driven liability out to 2050 — the first such mandate from a US insurance regulator. “The last decade has taught insurance regulators a hard truth: Resilience is not optional, it is a global responsibility,” Lara stated. A virtual public hearing on the regulation is set for July 28. (California Department of Insurance)

A federal judge in South Carolina ruled the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) termination of Biden-era Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants was illegal, dealing a blow to Trump administration efforts to dismantle the US$2.8bn pool earmarked for climate mitigation and resilience projects. District Judge Richard Gergel voided the EPA’s cancellation but stopped short of ordering the agency to resume administering grants, calling reinstatement “impractical” given staff terminations. He also denied a deadline extension for awarding funds, due in September. The Inflation Reduction Act program funded community projects on pollution, extreme heat and infrastructure. The EPA said it is reviewing the ruling. (Inside Climate News)

New Zealand’s largest insurer IAG branded the government’s approach to natural hazard risk management as “ad hoc and piecemeal,” warning it will erode the country’s economic resilience unless replaced by a systemic, long-term framework. A report issued last week by the insurer – – A long-term approach to natural hazard risk reduction – identifies 42 specific gaps requiring action across a 15-year roadmap, including the absence of any single body with system-wide accountability and no nationally agreed risk reduction targets against which progress is tracked. Natural hazards have cost New Zealand at least NZ$64bn (US$37.4bn) in direct losses over the past 15 years, with roughly 95% absorbed by response and recovery rather than prevention. (IAG)

The UK government has allocated £50mn (US$67mn) to the English county of Somerset for flood resilience works after it suffered the wettest week in 12 years this past January. The funding will support adaptation infrastructure including pumping capacity, dredging, and watercourse maintenance. It follows an earlier £89.9m (US$121mn) in flood prevention funds announced for the county in March. (BBC News)

Environmental disclosure platform CDP has launched an AI-powered Adaptation & Action Explorer allowing resilience practitioners to investigate the climate risks and adaptation actions of more than 1,000 subnational authorities across 80 countries.

Users can query which adaptation measures will most benefit vulnerable populations, which hazards are intensifying locally, and how their strategies compare with peer cities. The platform also highlights investable resilience projects and helps governments communicate funding needs to investors. The tool targets a documented gap between the volume of climate disclosure data now available and local governments' capacity to translate it into bankable adaptation investment plans.The new tool was built with Google’s non-profit arm, Google.org, with climate hazard data from Google Earth Engine. 

The Adaptation & Action Explorer follows the launch of Adaptbase by Cornell Tech – a research tool that maps climate adaptation plans, policies, and solutions across cities worldwide – and comes ahead of the full public release of ResilienceArc, an open access platform for assessing corporate exposure and resilience to physical climate risk, produced by UK non-profit Climate Arc.

Last week, CDP also announced it is splitting into two entities — a commercial unit and charitable foundation — to help scale its data and reporting services. The commercial entity, CDP, is being backed by a majority investment from private equity company Permira – its first deal under its energy transition strategy – and will pursue efforts to deploy CDP data and insights to paying customers. The charitable arm, CDP Foundation, will instead “focus on translating world-leading science into action-ready disclosure methods.” The spin-out follows a restructuring last year when CDP laid off one-fifth of its staff, citing rising costs and “economic challenges”.

While financial terms were not disclosed, the CDP Foundation retains a board seat and shareholder stake in the commercial arm. UK Charity Commission approval is required before the spin-out can close, expected within six months. CDP was founded as a non-profit in 2000 to make environmental reporting and risk management “a new business norm”. It conducts a disclosure cycle each year gathering data from companies, cities, and subnational governments on their climate actions. Last year, over 22,000 companies disclosed through CDP.

Engineering consultancy Arcadis and climate analytics company Jupiter Intelligence have launched the PRICE (Pinpoint, Rank, Investment case, Capital strategy, Execute) Adaptation Framework, a five-step decision methodology designed to help organizations quantify the return on climate adaptation investment. The framework leverages Jupiter’s physical hazard modeling and Arcadis’s Climate Risk Nexus platform, allowing organizations to model, compare, and prioritize potential adaptations for infrastructure systems, asset portfolios, and communities. Arcadis and Jupiter have been in a formal partnership since late 2025, with PRICE the latest output from this tie-up. (Arcadis)

Liberty Mutual Insurance and satellite tech firm ICEYE have launched a building-level parametric wildfire insurance solution that aims to get fire-struck homeowners payouts within days of an event, giving them ready cash to support their financial recovery. At its core is technology that classifies properties as "destroyed" or "undamaged" using images from ICEYE's synthetic aperture radar constellation, combined with detailed property footprint data. Liberty Mutual is targeting homeowner associations, municipalities, public risk pools, and infrastructure owners looking to close protection gaps left by traditional coverage. (ICEYE) 

Willis, a division of insurance broker and risk consultancy WTW has upgraded its Climate Diagnostic model to strengthen risk managers’ understanding of how extreme weather events and other climate hazards impact property insurance markets. The tool is now embedded into WTW’s Risk IQ platform allowing users to incorporate data on material climate risks directly into broking workflows and risk analyses. It also provides interactive climatic and exposure maps so users can identify high-risk areas and vulnerable assets. (WTW)

Agritech start-up SWARM Engineering raised a US$10mn Series A to expand AI-powered decision tools for agrifood and manufacturing companies facing supply chain volatility. S2G Investments and AgRogue Growth Partners co-led the round, with six additional investors participating. The San Francisco-based company’s platform ingests client data and runs scenarios across thousands of variables producing insights that facilitate faster, higher-quality decisions on supply chains, logistics, and workforce allocation by operations teams. (SWARM Engineering)

San Diego Gas & Electric, Qualcomm Technologies, and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography have announced Edge Alert Sentinel (EAS), a system designed to bring AI-powered wildfire and extreme weather detection to utilities and first responders. The collaboration, initially deployed in San Diego, is designed to show how “edge-based AI can support grid reliability, emergency preparedness and climate resilience.” ‘Edge-based AI’ refers to running AI and machine learning models directly on local hardware devices. EAS is powered by Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ9 processor, and runs on-device MLOps models to forecast conditions threatening grid infrastructure in residential areas. (Sempra)

The UNFCCC Technology Mechanism has joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance, deepening a collaboration aimed at improving access to open-source software, open data, and open AI systems that support climate resilience and adaptation in developing countries. The partnership builds on a jointly curated Digital Public Goods for Climate Action Collection, a catalogue of vetted open digital tools covering climate information systems, early-warning platforms, energy planning, and decision-support applications. (UNFCCC)

Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea-level extremes since 1900 (Nature Climate Change)

Increasing tropical cyclone rainfall and landslide risk in Southern California (Nature Climate Change)

A global early warning system for predicting exposure of biodiversity to extreme heat (Nature Climate Change)

Building user-driven climate adaptation products (Nature)

Reconciling flood-risk reduction and wetland resilience behind coastal floodgates (Nature Water)

Management practices and elevated atmospheric CO2 levels helped to sustain a high level of global rice production (Scientific Reports)

Intra-urban air quality under future Representative Concentration Pathways: modeling experiments for an Eastern Mediterranean city (npj Clean Air)

Divergent evolution of nitrogen cycling along gradients of landscape water velocities (Science)

Permafrost carbon–climate feedback amplifies Earth system tipping risks (Environmental Research Letters)

Earlier flash drought onset driven by Spring vegetation greening and warming (Geophysical Research Letters)

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor