The Resilience Intelligence Fund is a cooperative thesis-driven fund providing seed capital and operational funding for initiatives that develop the ingredients of a sustainable-investment and resilience-insight economy. Establishing and supporting operation of the Fund is a core aim of the Climate Value Exchange, because we believe everyone has a right to resilience and to the benefits of best practices based on the best available science.

Climate-related harm and cost are real, measurable, and cannot be wished away. The 2022 Global Turning Point report found the world will spend, lose, or waste $178 trillion responding to unchecked climate disruption by 2070. The 2024 Food System Economics Commission report found unsustainable practices and their impacts on climate, Nature, health, and the wider economy, cost $15.428 trillion per year.

That level of misinvestment is one clear way to understand the difference between sustainable and unsustainable. We cannot invest wisely or sufficiently in education, healthcare, science, and infrastructure, if we are devoting such huge sums to wasteful and destructive practices and their ripple effects.

Resilience knowledge has measurable value, and can avoid catastrophic risks and costs, both for the institutions that use that knowledge and for those affected by ripple effects moving through value chains they depend on. It is inevitable that, to avoid misinvestment and destabilizing impacts and costs, institutions large and small will find ways to recalibrate operations and investments.

The Active Value Trust Ratings project refers to this process as the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits. The BHC is a multidimensional metric that allows decision-makers to choose options that establish a wider base of foundational resilience value, making it less likely other goods and services will cause compounding risk and cost later on. This can be shown to have substantial benefit to long-term budget outlooks, especially in the public sector.

In other words: It makes sense for everyone who must abide by laws and regulations to maximize resilience value and intentionally reduce unsustainability risk. The Resilience Intelligence Fund will support initiatives that offer elements of that leverage for better decision-making, starting with three crucial data-related ventures:

1. The Networked Earth System Science Initiative (NESSI), supporting data production, management, and distribution
2. The Active Value Trust Ratings platform (AVTR), developing metrics that translate multidimensional data into actionable insights
3. The Good Food Finance Data Initiative, aimed at integrating data systems to support sustainable food production

The Fund will also aim to establish core operational funding and catalytic partnerships related to: 

1. Resilience insight services – Incubator initiatives that support development of locally rooted small and medium-sized enterprises that provide resilience insights and related business model design services to clients, including local and regional governments;
2. The Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation (CIP), driving investment into sustainable food system practices across value chains;
3. The Climate Value Exchange (CVE), which will serve as a convening and publications partner to the RIF, to help spread climate-related innovation in practices, incentives, business models, technology, and financing.

The Resilience Intelligence Fund allows for creating a shared staff for core ideation and development needs for the three data ventures. This core staffing component would start with ideation, design, partnership coordination, and platform development, and would shift over time to operational support for platforms emerging from this work. The Fund aims to commit $10 million per year to core staffing needs for the data-related endeavors. 

For the co-investment and cooperative innovation platforms, including the Climate Value Exchange, the Fund aims to commit another $10 million per year. The incubation efforts for resilience insight services and the co-investment management supporting a shift to sustainable food systems will boost external endeavors that attract public and private capital, while benefitting from philanthropic and multilateral development grants.

Over ten years, the aim will be to mobilize at least $200 million to provide direct, cooperative, and catalytic support to activities in these designated areas. The Fund will track peer, rival, cooperative, and organic market growth in related areas—to measure impact and sharpen metrics for multidimensional performance tracking, and to support targeted investments that can expand the overall development of resilience insight systems and practices.

Examples of success include: 

• Improved infrastructure, both built and green, that allows for reduced impacts from climate-related disasters and facilitates adaptive management in an age of systemic risks;
• Expanded regenerative and agroecological food production, protecting watersheds and ecosystems, while diversifying and improving rural livelihoods; 
• More affordable food that is also better for human health outcomes, improving budgets in the public and private sectors; 
• Healthier local economies, as communities move away from high-risk activities that carry large hidden costs and toward resilience-building investments and priorities;
• Industrial value chains that leverage resilience insights to compete for better informed consumers, who have added leverage due to more choices being sustainable;
• Effective green budgeting that uses actionable resilience insights to target investments and incentives to eliminate hidden costs and better secure future wellbeing;
• All of these supported by resilience-focused SMEs and multidimensional data platforms that make it easy for non-experts to straightforwardly choose resilience.

With active, everyday resilience intelligence moving through local economies, we can achieve a future of expanding, shared prosperity. Without that urgently needed insight, such improved living conditions will become unachievable for most people.

While the Resilience Intelligence Fund is intended to serve as a foundational cooperative investment to support the rapid development, diversification, and mainstreaming of resilience insight systems and practices, the overall plan includes a goal of establishing a self-sustaining funding strategy. Anchor donors would set the project in motion, while the Fund develops deep learning about flexible business strategies for developing and deploying high-resolution resilience intelligence locally and at scale. 

This background of process learning and refinement would allow the Fund to support ongoing strategic recalibration of partner platforms and services, and to identify areas of work where new efficiencies can achieve sizeable long-term savings for co-investors, practitioners, jurisdictions, and value chain actors. This insight-sharing process would work through the participating platforms, rather than being wholly owned by the Fund. 

In keeping with the Resilience Intel Charter, the Resilience Intelligence Fund will connect diverse constellations of observation, insight-generation, and business model innovation, to: 

1. Show the resilience value of any kind of spending or financial instrument.
2. Build science-based resilience intelligence, across whole economies, to provide actionable insight to financial and political decision-makers.
3. Inform economy-wide national climate action plans (ENCAP), leveraging the catalytic value added from locally rooted clean development and cross-sector collaboration.
4. Incentivize climate-smart agricultural practices, sustainable stewardship of water resources (including the upstream and downstream components of a healthy ocean economy), clean air, and other core supports for a healthy human relationship to natural systems.
5. Catalyze public-private partnerships to ensure ongoing expanded collaboration for higher-resolution integration of Earth systems insights into economic analyses and knowledge-sharing systems.
6. Stimulate new areas of mainstream banking activity intended to support the expansion of business models that harness and build Resilience Intelligence and/or Resilience Value.

Because the Resilience Intelligence Fund aims to support bold innovation for sustainable development in local context, we will maintain an active insight-sharing platform for partners and stakeholders, to ensure good practices spread and barriers to financing and operational innovation can be addressed in a timely and efficient way.

• The steady expansion of resilience intelligence embedded in everyday business activities will make it easier for institutions, businesses, and consumers, to choose sustainable practices across the board.
• 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.
• By 2040, participating jurisdictions and value chain operators should have the opportunity to dedicate close to 100% of all transacted expenditures to climate-smart and resilience-building practices and services.

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