CONCEPT: The Resilience Intelligence Fund will support data systems innovation and cross-platform insight-sharing, to deliver actionable climate resilience insights.
All business activity is a kind of economic development. ‘Integral and holistic human development’ refers to policies, investments, and business activities that meet everyday needs, do so without polluting or harming people or Nature, expand opportunity and incomes for people and nations, and support durable good outcomes.
That is what people generally mean when they talk about ‘the economy’:
- Are we well-served by policies, investments, and business activities that meet these common-sense standards?
- Or is something else playing out, through our everyday experience, that erodes our changes of experiencing that better way of life?
‘The economy’ is the entire fabric of society—raucuous and complicated, interactive, and jostled by conflicting pressures. We know it is full of nuance and error and incomplete thinking, and the always imperfect process of planning and implementation at the individual, local, regional, and national levels.
Even as climate dangers deepen and the costs of disasters rise, there is still a political faction that wishes all of the risk, harm, and cost, could be ignored. In 2025 and 2026, we have seen outright suppression of scientific data, in what appears to be a coordinated attempt to destroy evidence. This corruption of data puts everyone at risk, and appears linked—from public statements made by proponents of this effort—to a desire to obscure the connection between polluting practices and trillions of dollars in harm and cost.
Climate-related harm and cost are real, measurable, and cannot be wished away. When specific polluting activities cause specific harmful impacts and related costs, such information naturally demands action to reduce the harm in question—on the basis of evidence, common-sense, legal particulars, and the general obligation to seek and serve justice.
Science is foundational to a free society
In the late 18th century, more than 100 years into the modern scientific revolution, the founding laws of the United States foresaw the need for structural supports for our response to this crisis. They did not write the word “climate”, but they required Congress support the advancement of science and forbade Congress from making any laws that would restrict the freedom to gather and share information.
The Constitution also mandated support for new infrastructure, interstate commerce, open civil society, and the ongoing, spontaneous communication between citizens, through formal or informal “peaceable” associations and a national postal service. It situated power outside of government, in the people, and ensured the people could defend their rights and liberties through a free press, local and state governments also accountable to the people, and through unfettered insight-sharing.
As planetary systems are disrupted by global heating, we need more detailed and diverse Earth system data. We need that data to be synthesized and cross-referenced, sourced, and refined, and applied, in ways that non-experts can make use of. We need everyday activities to devote this kind of information to the work of reducing risk and building resilience.
At this time, when seemingly all questions of public debate are treated as partisan, political, and ideological, we need to recognize that the modern world has been shaped by science, and that this is possible because free societies required that entrenched power recognize evidence and work in service of even the most vulnerable. Human rights are paramount, and so we ask what is real, conduct research, identify problems, and engineer solutions.
Why resilience matters
An examination of what we mean by climate resilience can help to illustrate why information integrity, including accuracy of raw and translated data, is so important. Resilience is another way of saying the ability to persist and to continue thriving.
Climate resilience adds a few layers to this already layered question:
- It means resilience in the face of worsening climate disruption and breakdown.
- That is not down to luck; it entails intentional adaptation measures to reduce the likelihood of failure in event of an emergency situation (more on this below).
- It also means systems are in place that provide for early warning, timely pre-impact response, evacuations where needed, and rapid recovery.
- Where climate-related resilience is low, or fails outright, major health impacts spread quickly through a population, including infectious diseases that can overwhelm recovery efforts and undermine long-term budget solvency.
- Climate resilience is also shorthand for resilience-building practices and capabilities.
- And, implicitly, climate resilience signals the need for climate-related information and best-practice insights.
All of this comes back to the notion of “future-proofing”. Earth Civics recently asked, in its July 2026 newsletter, “How innovative is your community?” The running theme was the community-level work of getting ready for and building resilience against future climate-related risks, or future-proofing.
The Climate Value Exchange has republished the Resilience Intel Charter, to breathe life into our global response to the worsening system resilience and climate security challenge. Resilience intelligence is what we know about our position on the spectrum of climate risk, cost, safety, and opportunity.
Investing for a better future
When we talk about big business, it is useful to pause and think for a moment about the sustainability challenge facing large companies that profit from pollution. Society is demanding, with the help of planetary health signals, that they stop polluting, so they need to figure out how to future-proof their operations, both against the effects of climate disruption and the demands of an increasingly well-informed market economy.
Once the contest of ideas is underway, polluters cannot claim to be unaware that their business activities are flawed and generating hidden costs paid for by others. They know this. The question is not whether they will change course; the question is whether they will still exist as businesses in the years to come, if they wait too long to make the needed adjustments.
The financial incentive to develop persistent, precise, actionable climate resilience data is embedded throughout the everyday economy. Banks, insurers, local and national governments, small businesses, farms, and households, all feel the price pressure, now, in real time, to know more, think ahead of the curve, and invest for a better future. The problem is: For many of those feeling that pressure, they cannot easily parse the climate-related pricing elements, and their choices are still too limited.
In order to move into a future informed by actionable resilience intelligence, communities need green budgets—that clearly identify and avoid embedded climate costs while directing investment toward the most efficient sustainable development advances. The information that can be easily translated and downscaled to fit local needs must be produced reliably, openly, and accessibly.
So, we are proposing a specialized Resilience Intelligence Fund—a cooperative thesis-driven fund aimed at steering capital from public, private, multilateral, and philanthropic sources, to the needed data systems innovation, cross-platform cooperative insight-sharing, and mainstream publishing projects necessary to deliver actionable climate resilience insights to municipalities, banks, insurers, small and medium-sized enterprises, lawmakers, retailers, and households.
The Fund aims to commit $10 million per year to operate and sustain a networked data translation effort. Over time, the RIF will support local, regional, and national green budgeting efforts, sustain always-on resilience-related data services, and link up to larger Earth-science and decision-data platforms, to optimize funding flows and ensure diversified flows of insight to drive innovation.
Another $10 million per year would support co-investment and cooperative innovation platforms, including the Climate Value Exchange. Over ten years, the aim will be to mobilize at least $200 million to provide direct, cooperative, and catalytic support to activities that advance the development and delivery of resilience intelligence for improved everyday decisions and outcomes.
Sovereign wealth funds, development assistance, and thesis-driven philanthropic funds can provide a structured foundation for private investment that expands capacity for using resilience-related insights to eliminate catastrophic risk and stabilize pressures on public budgets and everyday opportunity and wellbeing.
Redefining Climate Finance
Since the 1992 United Nations Climate Convention (the UNFCCC) was agreed, climate finance has generally referred to dedicated investments that are close to 100% dedicated to a specific climate-related goal—principally the decarbonization of energy systems or adaptation and resilience measures. Since the Paris Agreement of 2015, there has been a steady rise in climate-related mainstream finance, and an interest in quantifying the portion of climate-related finance that retains this “pure” impact-oriented focus.
As we move toward the crucial year 2030, when we will enter the last decade in which it will be possible to avoid irreversible long-term climate disruption and related system breakdown, resilience intelligence data, services, and related innovations, will be crucial. Investments that make communities smarter, that recalibrate budgets and services to operate more efficiently against the background of climate-related risk and cost, will further expand the defintion of climate-related finance.
A priority for the Resilience Intelligence Fund and the Climate Value Exchange will be to maintain an evolving registry of financial instruments, cooperative de-risking strategies, and co-investment mechanisms, that allow for greater resilience intelligence and operational resilience across the mainstream economy. This reference will be made available openly for all potential beneficiaries, with a higher level of refined, structured guidance for subscribers and for select RIF-funded stakeholders.
By the year 2030, our goal is to see participating jurisdictions and value chain operators dedicating at least 50% of all transacted expenditures to activities that reduce climate risk and advance resilience, both within their operations and for the benefit of those around them.
The Ecopoet 