For more than a decade, Gareth Phillips has been wrestling with a problem that has dogged global climate policy: how to finance adaptation to climate change in a way that is credible and scalable.
Phillips, who manages the climate and environment finance Division at the African Development Bank, has worked on climate finance since the early days of carbon markets, when emission reductions were still an unfamiliar concept. He watched how abstract ideas, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions, slowly turned into assets that could be bought, sold, and traded, and eventually into a voluntary market dominated by corporate buyers.
But climate adaptation, he said, never made that leap. It never became something investors figured out how to back.