‘There's always this question around risk and return’
🌐 On climate resilience, in conversation with Mayuri Ghosh of the Clinton Global Initiative.
🌐 WorldWise View | global perspectives on health, development, planet
Let’s cut to the bottom line.
As our conversation comes to an end, Mayuri Ghosh wants to leave me—and you—with two key words:
Speed and Scale.
A book of that title has become something of a personal ‘Bible’. “It's mostly focused on mitigation,” she tells me. “But the message is clear for adaptation, and anything related to climate and action.”
Ghosh joined the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) a few months ago to lead its work on climate resilience. Part of the job involves getting a firm grasp of on-the-ground projects and curating what the organisation calls “commitment makers”, whose work will be shared in a meeting convened by CGI in New York next week (September 19-21), timed with the UN General Assembly.
There are many organisations out there doing their bit, with the right resources. But we all know that it doesn’t make for enough progress on climate change.
In this interview—edited for brevity and clarity as usual—we talk about what it really takes to make tangible progress, focusing on adaptation and the bottom line: financing. To unlock it at speed and scale, Ghosh says, you need to get investors good data; and you need to get the right people in the room.
What do you do as director of climate resilience at CGI?
I'm leading our climate pillar, which is looking at resilience in terms of both climate mitigation [and] adaptation. The primary focus of our work is to work with our commitment makers—those are community-based organisations; large and small NGOs, corporates, social entrepreneurs—but really try and understand what’s happening on the ground in terms of new, specific, measurable and viable projects which we can elevate to the CGI platform. So a lot of my work is focused on understanding that, curating that, and working with our community of partners.
What does climate resilience mean to you?
To me, climate resilience is the ability to prepare for, recover from and also adapt to the negative impact of climate change. Irrespective of how successful people are at limiting the main cause of warming, we as a society are facing significant impacts—already, we're experiencing more frequent and severe weather, ocean warming, extended periods of droughts, extreme temperatures, and many other damaging effects. And while this is global, when we say resilience, I believe efforts really have to be executed at the community and local levels. Because that's where the leaders are closest to the communities.
Let's take the latest example in the news, which is the major flooding in Pakistan. A third of the country is underwater, dozens of people have died, hundreds of thousands lost their homes. Looking at that, I'm wondering what to expect on building resilience—we see year after year that countries aren't doing enough on planning and governance, and Western institutions aren't delivering the financial aid promised. Where do you see a realistic way forward?
Adaptation has become an increasingly important topic. But financing is one of the biggest levers; and it has to be at speed, and at scale. It's really a mindset shift. Organisations are really trying to figure out how to work through this, what they call ‘loss and damage’: once you know you're not able to even adapt, as we see now in Pakistan, how do you unlock that capital? So there's a lot of discussion around risk assessment. But being more proactive around that is absolutely required. And it's both public and private sector financing which has to be unlocked.
Some of our community-based organisations and NGOs are working on the ground around these issues. We have an organisation working with vulnerable poor communities in Bangladesh. They have a climate adaptive graduation programme launching, and that's targeted [at] around 150,000 people. It's a programme which will increase the adaptive capacity of women and broader populations, helping them become more resilient, economically and socially. One of our commitment makers is working in Honduras to reduce involuntary climate-driven migration [in] the Sula Valley, [which] is very vulnerable to flooding. And it's really about training local builders to undertake [housing] retrofit projects. They can do this independently, but they can train others as well. There are already pilot homes which have been successfully retrofitted. These are the kinds of initiatives we hope to elevate through CGI.
We hear a lot about isolated initiatives from various organisations, and I think we all know that the challenge is how to achieve change on a large scale. Are these smaller initiatives going to create the momentum for change—or are you still putting your money on climate finance coming through the UNFCCC process?
You know, I'd say the CGI and my point of view is that it has to be both—and it has to be faster, it has to be much more at scale than it's happening right now. As you said, there are many of these examples of what's already happening. For CGI, they have to be viable and partially funded already—so we know it's not just ideas on paper. Having said that, there is much more capital which needs to be unlocked to scale. I think the community fears that there is limited concessional funding which is currently available from development partners, and higher capital has to be mobilised from the private sector.
There's always this question around risk and return, which I keep coming back to, and I think the corporate and other public institutions keep coming back to. Understanding risk is crucial. But obviously, we have to move beyond that—and innovative financial instruments, risk mitigation instruments, blending of public and private financing is needed to unlock capital. The Global Commission on Adaptation [says] that investing just US$1.8 trillion in climate adaptation over this decade—so 2020 to 2030—could generate over US$7 trillion in total net benefits. It's really about deploying that capital and doing it quickly. So all these meetings are important, but every stakeholder, in their little and big efforts, will want to elevate and continue pushing for action.
“When an organisation is looking to fund [a] project—when we're trying to unlock capital from the private sector—there is a mindset of return. There needs to be a risk assessment.”
—Mayuri Ghosh, CGI
Tell me a little bit more about risk and return—could you break it down for us?
There is obviously risk associated with climate which we're already seeing at play. There are scientific models around low - moderate - high [risk], and there's a timespan around it. But there's also less data available from the most vulnerable areas, like from Africa, from South Asia from East Asia. So when an organisation is looking to fund [a] project—when we're trying to unlock capital from the private sector—there is a mindset of return. There needs to be the risk assessment in terms of what the return is over the medium, short and long term.
The good news is that there are the right kinds of actors on the ground. We have some commitment makers which are trying to bring in the private sector hat, but really understand the local on the ground context, and are creating this awareness—working with the IFC [International Finance Corporation], the World Bank, donors in Western Europe to put together some of these new financing models, so that there is understanding of the risk in the local context. There is some form of a data capture to make the investors comfortable. But again, that varies a bit country to country.
You're asking some of these questions in an adaptation-focused Spotlight session at the September meeting. What’s your own personal view or answer to, for example, the question of how we increase the financing available?
This is where we really try to push the organisations during the session. [What] I feel [they] need to think about, if they're not already, is how can economic and environmental sustainability be the bedrock of the future global economy? So not just the short-term profits, but having that long-term mindset. Obviously, there are challenges which I mentioned in terms of the risk assessment, which is a major barrier. So how can private and public sector actors break this financing gridlock? I don't have an answer, but that's something we have to answer as a community with the experts.
You mentioned risk assessment as the barrier a couple of times. How big is the issue of not having enough data from some of the more affected countries?
I'd say it's a mix. I'll give another example: we're working with a couple of commitment makers specifically around urban resilience. They have pilots in the Nordics, in the West. It's a platform for understanding climate risks associated with the city—what's the current level of emissions, where can you really make changes, customise, based on your own city ecosystem, for both mitigation as well as adaptation measures. And they have shared that many of the city-specific data are not available in East Asia or Africa or Latin America. Having said that, now there are bigger data systems like Google Earth; there are universities which are working with datasets. It's really about connecting the dots and bringing all the groups together.
Are there any success stories you can highlight from the partnerships you're working with?
We've talked about one success story, which is more of a scaling case: our Empire State Realty Trust, based here in New York, which is committed to expanding and updating decarbonisation. New York City has some of the most strict building codes. It's also very prone to climate impacts. In New York City, buildings and the built environment are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. A few months back the Empire State Realty Trust launched a playbook which they're continuously adding [to], which will provide building owners with specific programme emission reduction targets. It's working in collaboration with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and keeping this as a very open-ended public playbook which others can leverage. Building retrofits is another of those high-impact areas within urban spaces—if you're able to do that, [it] takes care of both mitigation as well as adaptation.
And are these initiatives that in general you think could be transferable to countries of the global south?
Yes. It will have to be customised. Obviously, there are building codes here in New York which would be different in the Caribbeans which have similar issues—but the playbook can be applied anywhere. The Global South has similar buildings, with increasing urbanisation and corporatisation.
What do you personally want to see happen at the meeting or following from the meeting?
For climate, we have 30 commitment makers [and] over 130 commitments between climate, health and inclusive economic growth and recovery, which are our three pillars. Many of them don't have visibility—they're doing something in Colombia, they're doing something in Honduras, doing something in Bangladesh. We really want to elevate those ideas—connect them [commitment makers] to like-minded partners, to be able to scale and replicate those ideas, just as we are talking about. We will have financiers in the room, we will have heads of state, city mayors. My aspiration is [that] we bring the right kind of groups together to talk about very tangible ideas with those who have the power to [do] it bigger, bolder—and do it quickly.
💡 Find out more about CGI’s September meeting
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Story Threads
As September kicked off, we caught up on key news from the past few weeks—head over to WorldWise on Twitter for threads on deforestation and land wars; climate change progress (or lack thereof) leading up to the UNFCCC talks in November; the geopolitical fine lines African countries are treading while pushed to take sides on the Ukraine war; the devastating floods in Pakistan; and a selection of stories on digital discrimination and control.
Media Insider
The third edition of the Science Journalism Forum (SJF) is taking place on October 29th to November 4th this year. It’s a global, multilingual online event that brings together science journalists, writers, publishers, scientists, students, and academia for a rich programme of talks and workshops on a range of topics related to science journalism. I have a couple of sessions in the works for the event—sign up for SJF updates (way at the bottom of the homepage) and stay tuned for more through future posts here.
In the Field
As I write these final words I’m sitting in a hotel room in Belém, northern Brazil, on the eve of an excursion to the Brazilian Amazon. Along with a handful of other journalists, I’ve been invited to join an expedition of researchers and Indigenous groups working together to document environmental impacts from human activity in the state of Pará. I’ll be sharing more from the journey down the line.
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