Community-Centric Climate Resilience Investing is Critical for COP28

The United Nations launched the Conference of the Parties (COP) in 1992 to tackle climate change. Thirty years later, climate change continues to accelerate, and companies and countries are missing targets or not setting them at all. Inaction is not an option - climate changedriven natural disasters will only increase in frequency and severity as the earth’s temperature rises. To make people and the planet better off, global political and business leaders need to move from compliance and short-term thinking to long-term, strategic systems thinking. These stakeholders must focus on resilience and build a bridge between the needs of impacted communities, businesses’ investment strategies and continuity plans. Key to tackling the complexity within the stakeholder groups is the need to forge the right public-private partnerships with empathy and compassion. We can do a lot without it, but we can never unlock the tremendous potential of proximate leaders that sit within the most marginalized, and therefore vulnerable to climate change, communities without the belief that members of these communities should participate in the cycle of innovation needed to address the existential crises driven by climate change. Governments and communities need businesses to go beyond compliance and business continuity and to become real partners in tackling the climate crisis. Businesses need a community-centric climate resilience investment framework and better tools to meet global net-zero targets.