Update on PREPARE Call to Action to the Private Sector

Private Sector Responses in 2024

AECOM is a multinational infrastructure consulting firm.

AECOM is the world’s trusted infrastructure consulting firm, partnering with clients to solve the world’s most complex challenges and build legacies for generations to come. Our vision is a world where infrastructure creates opportunity for everyone – uplifting communities, improving access to services, and sustaining our planet. In support of PREPARE, AECOM commits to increasing the resilience of selected cities and communities in USAID cooperating countries, including the most vulnerable populations, through the use of PlanEngage, our digital stakeholder engagement and planning platform. Target countries may include Colombia, Jordan, and the Philippines.

In adopting and using PlanEngage, stakeholders will strengthen their climate resilience planning by creating and sharing information in an online environment that improves data integration and visualization, inclusive stakeholder engagement, and streamlined workflows. As part of this effort, AECOM will facilitate technical exchanges with practitioners from U.S. cities that have experience using PlanEngage.

ASTM International, a global leader in publishing over 12,000 voluntary documentary standards, supports climate adaptation efforts. Science-based, consensus standards can provide practical, sustainable solutions to various challenges such as flooding, extreme heat, high winds, and other climate-related hazards to property assets, ecosystems, and overall human wellbeing. In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, ASTM pledges to enhance climate resilience through several key initiatives.

ASTM will create and revise standards to help identify climate vulnerabilities and take concrete adaptation actions in areas including community mapping, flood mitigation, property resilience, flood-resistant building materials, sustainable agriculture, and smart textiles (e.g. temperature-responsive clothing for outdoor workers and firefighters).

To promote effective implementation, ASTM will provide access to these standards at no cost through its Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) program, which currently supports over 125 regional and national standards bodies across the globe. ASTM will offer quarterly capacity-building sessions to MoU partners and other interested stakeholders to expand use of climate resilience standards beyond the 37 partners that currently cite them. ASTM will also provide a trusted platform for collaboration on developing new standards to address the needs of climate-vulnerable communities in developing countries, leveraging its global network and consensus-based process.

ASTM will develop an online repository of case studies showcasing examples of voluntary technical standards applied in emerging economies to enhance climate resilience. ASTM will also compile a database of over 700 standards from 65 organizations to support the UN DRR’s Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities, helping cities move from assessment to action. Providing local officials with a list of technical standards helps streamline climate action by guiding sustainable, low-carbon, and resilient urban development.

AstraZeneca is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical business and our innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide.

AstraZeneca is delighted to respond to the PREPARE Call to Action with a commitment to support the climate adaptation of health systems in 9 African countries. Through the expansion of our Healthy Heart Africa programme, we will work through public-private partnerships to strengthen the resilience of systems with a focus on heart and kidney diseases.

This is the first time that the programme, first established in 2014, will specifically address climate-induced health threats across the continent. In collaboration with key partners, the expanded programme will be operational across Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Uganda by 2025.

The impact of heart and kidney diseases on African people and society is immense and growing, claiming millions of lives each year. This disease burden is now being exacerbated by climate change, with extreme heat adding stress to the human body and impairing the function of these vital organs. With health impacts disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations, including older people and those with underlying health conditions, there is an urgent need to ensure more equitable health outcomes for patients across Africa.

AstraZeneca’s Healthy Heart Africa commitment will help health systems adapt to the rising disease burden, particularly from extreme heat, by:

• Improving education and awareness of heart and kidney diseases
• Increasing access to screening, early detection and guideline-based care
• Providing healthcare worker training on the prevention and optimal management of heart and kidney diseases
• Generating evidence on the clinical, socio-economic and environmental burden of disease to support measures to help develop policies and build long-term health system sustainability and resilience

AXA is a global insurance company, with a commitment to Protect What Matters, through in part AXA EssentiALL, the inclusive insurance business of AXA, and AXA Climate, with expertise in consulting on climate risks, energy, nature-based solutions, agriculture, forestry and other transition risks, to support adaptation. We recognise the challenges faced by underserved communities to build resilience to climate events.

As part of AXA EssentiALL’s commitment to provide affordable and attractive insurance products to more than 20 million people by 2026, and in response to the PREPARE Call to Action, AXA pledges to foster resilience for underserved communities through climate impact assessment, stakeholder education, and increased accessibility of insurance across agriculture value chains in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

We are doing this through strategic engagements with public and private sector entities, to work with distribution and producer networks assisting in climate information to understand risk, developing solutions to mitigate risk and derisk the transition of practice change, and the provision of insurance at the last mile to workers and smallholder farmers as a way to support livelihoods and build resilience.

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products.

Cisco’s purpose is to Power an Inclusive Future for All. Cisco innovations are helping to secure the future of agriculture in climate-stricken regions. Rising temperatures, increasing droughts, and other weather disasters are straining the agricultural sector, leading to food insecurity and economic hardships. Coffee production, critical to economic stability and growth in many developing and emerging nations across Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, is one of the products most endangered by climate change. According to the Climate Institute, 50% of coffee production areas are at risk of disappearing by 2050.

In 2024, Cisco began partnering with ConSenso Project to deploy technology to help coffee farmers in Tanzania develop farming solutions that efficiently use available water, preserve soil quality, and enable more resilient crop yields. Tanzania is among the 20 largest coffee-producing countries in the world. Helping farmers navigate through changing environmental conditions is essential to their success and that of the nation. As part of the program, Cisco’s LoRaWAN, a radio-transmission technology known for its long-distance data transmission and low-power consumption, is used to connect IoT sensors that are attached to coffee trees. These sensors capture a wealth of data on soil, sun, climate, carbon capture, insects, and the plants’ electrical energy fields, which can reveal their well-being and needs. Cisco cloud and LTE technologies further support the secure transfer of data collected by the sensors to researchers who study how to optimize irrigation and scarce water resources.

Under the PREPARE Call to Action, Cisco intends to expand this prior effort and share its expertise, resources, and insights derived from the pilot project in Tanzania to develop a scalable, open-source methodology and tool kit that can be used by farmers in climate change impacted areas to optimize use of resources such as water and land. Cisco plans to work with key partners to extend and deploy this model in other coffee producing countries, notably in Africa, Central and South America.

Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol with over 200 brands, employing 30,000 people in 130 sites in 30 countries with net sales of $20.3bn.

We are dependent on natural resources to produce our iconic brands, and water is both the most important and under stress.

Driven by Diageo’s “Spirit of Progress” mission” and responding to the PREPARE Call to Action, Diageo are accelerating efforts to steward water resources and support communities where we operate.

We prioritize water efficiency in operations around the world, replenish water-stressed communities and take multi-stakeholder collective action to improve water accessibility, availability and quality.

In Mexico climate change is driving water shortages and droughts. Diageo has committed to replenish more water than the company uses in its tequila operations by 2026.

In 2024, Diageo partnered with the State of Jalisco and local municipality in Ocotlán, replenishing over 470,000 cubic meters of water.

This month, Diageo launched a new WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) partnership with BharatCares benefiting communities in Meghalaya, our eighth such program in the country.

In 2023, Diageo began regenerative agriculture pilots in Mexico & Ireland to support farmers cultivating grain, barley and agave to become more resilient and resource-efficient while reducing the impact of farming.

Diageo measures and addresses water-stress, nature loss, reduces emissions and supports the climate resiliency of our operations and the communities where we work.

Diageo is committed to investing in, developing and scaling collaborative cross-industry opportunities in partnership with other businesses, governments, NGOs and innovators, connecting with entrepreneurs through our Diageo Sustainable Solutions Platform.

Fugro is the world’s leading Geo-data specialist with more than 11,000 employees in 60 countries. With a unique map, model, and monitor approach, Fugro provides critical insights about the planet and structures built upon it, for both public and private sector clients. Fugro contributes to a safe and liveable world by delivering actionable advice and science-based solutions, based on Geo-data, in support of the energy transition, sustainable infrastructure, climate resilience and nature preservation.

In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Fugro is committed to collaborating with governments, academia, civil society (NGOs), and the private sector in the developing countries to facilitate data-driven decision-making for understanding and restoring nature, building upon the seagrass mapping project in Italy and the mangrove assessment project in Queensland.

Fugro is committed to developing coastal resilience and adaptation plans for at-risk countries using science-based high-resolution numerical modeling and Geo-data expertise, particularly in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to support the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS).

Fugro is committed to driving technological innovation to scale fundamental research into commercially viable and Geo-data enabled tools to address climate change challenges, including through adaptation.

Fugro is committed to advancing offshore wind biodiversity initiatives and scaling up technologies for comprehensive ecosystem and biodiversity monitoring to ensure nature preservation at scale. This includes enhancing current technologies used for asset-level offshore wind biodiversity monitoring to cover large marine areas efficiently.

There’s no meaningful adaptation plan that doesn’t hinge on an equipped, skilled workforce to execute it. In every region of the world and every industry of the economy, new green skills related to climate science, data analysis, modeling, hazard communications, and scenario planning are increasingly critical. In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, LinkedIn commits to helping to shape capacity building efforts by sharing insights on the skills most crucial to developing resilience and equipping workers to participate in the changing global economy. LinkedIn stands ready to support this work through growing the green skills library within LinkedIn Learning, sharing data, and providing philanthropic support to green skills training efforts supporting vulnerable populations around the world.

As the world’s largest professional network with more than 1 billion members globally, LinkedIn has unique and granular insights into the future of work. Each year, LinkedIn shares labor market insights from its Economic Graph showing how governments, UN and multilateral agencies, employers, and education institutions can work together to build a workforce ready to mitigate carbon emissions and adapt to a changing environment. By supporting green skills development, LinkedIn will contribute to the twin objectives of building resilient economies and helping workers access the economic opportunities generated by the transition to a more sustainable future.

Private Sector Responses in 2023

Aon is a leading global professional services firm that exists to shape decisions for the better – to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world. Aon’s 50,000 colleagues support our clients’ climate resiliency through advanced analytics and innovation to match risk to capital.

Aon is delighted to work with the Global Resilience Partnership, USAID and the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate to respond to PREPARE. Aon welcomes the opportunity to support PREPARE and the President’s agenda to help companies and communities transition to a nature-positive, climate-resilient world, as a significant reallocation of capital will be required for a transition to a low carbon economy and enhanced community stability.

In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Aon is announcing a collaboration with the African Development Bank. Very few farmers in Africa are insured against the impacts of climate and Aon’s work is designed to support the expansion of crop insurance coverage across the continent, starting with the small-scale producers that serve as the first mile of global and regional food supply chains.

Operating across the continent, this project intends to leverage emerging technologies, such as the innovative African satellite and AI data provider Amini, to expand crop insurance coverage, foster climate resilience and financial inclusion for smallholder farmers, while encouraging them to practice water efficiency and regenerative agriculture.

Aon will focus on assisting with development of the local insurance market, with the goal of bringing innovative insurance products and expanded insurance capacity across the continent, supporting the African Climate Risk and Insurance Facility for Adaptation facility (ACRIFA). ACRIFA’s focus is at the intersection of agri-food systems, climate change, and insurance and the African Development Bank’s mission is to mobilize USD $25bn in climate finance between 2020-2025. Aon and the African Development Bank will work together in an effort to harness a unique opportunity to leverage the challenge of escalating climate risks into opportunities for growth and adaptation.

Arup is a global sustainable development consultancy. A decade ago, we worked with cities and for cities around the world to develop the City Resilience Index (CRI). The CRI provided a revolutionary conceptualisation of urban resilience that has been used to build capacity and target action in over 100 cities benefiting hundreds of millions of people. Ten years on Arup commits to working with partners to refresh the CRI to understand how the landscape of urban shocks and stresses has evolved in the context of increasing climatic vulnerabilities and to apply lessons learnt to support vulnerable cities and their populations continue their resilience journeys.

With urbanisation most rapid in climate vulnerable regions including sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, it is critical that our approaches to building resilience are tailored to and informed by these geographies. Arup commits to growing and building our own capacity and expertise in these geographies, working with our partners and supply-chain to tackle the multifaceted challenges emerging in these regions as well as to facilitate knowledge sharing that contributes to globally relevant innovations that strengthen the resilience of communities and places, aligned to PREPARE’s objectives.

Our suite of digital tools, which includes TerrAIn and Uheat, provides rapid assessment of climatic risks and enables targeted interventions including nature-based solutions. As part of our pledge, Arup commits to further developing these tools for application in vulnerable geographies and to exploring opportunities to facilitate their use by and with local partners and governments thereby enhancing local capacity to tackle climatic hazards.

Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) mission is to unlock the potential of those who advance the world. As a global consulting firm, BCG partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities. The firm works with thousands of companies, governments, and civil society organizations on their societal and planetary impact, including work on net zero journeys, critical needs of investing in adaptation and resilience, and a just transition to a green global economy. Today, there is a massive and persistent adaptation and resilience funding gap, delaying implementation of actions and scaling of solutions needed to protect the most vulnerable communities in developing countries. BCG’s contribution to the PREPARE Call to Action aims to provide a compelling business case based on rigorous new analysis to galvanize the private sector to advance climate adaptation and resilience across critical sectors of the global economy. BCG will focus resources and expertise to develop the analytical foundations, evaluate transactions, demystify the benefits and identify pathways for the private sector to invest in this important space. BCG delivered a flagship report at COP28 that articulates the imperatives and opportunities for private sector investment in adaptation and resilience.

Blue Marble is a consortium of leading insurance organizations with a mission to create socially impactful and commercially viable insurance solutions for underserved populations. We aim to enable access to insurance and build risk management capacity for these populations along commodity supply-chains. We have strategic partnerships with several like-minded global brands to achieve this objective.

Our commitment to the PREPARE Call to Action to the Private Sector is to support the climate adaptation of underserved populations along commodity supply-chains through innovative insurance solutions and build risk management capacity to enable the mobilization of at least $200 million in climate protection across Latin America, Africa and Asia, impacting the lives of at least 2 million individuals by 2027.

Danone is responding to the PREPARE Call to Action through its Regenerative Agriculture & Methane Matters strategies to invest in climate resilience across key agricultural supply chains in approximately 12 countries. Danone is firmly committed to regenerative agriculture and promoting practices that protect soil, water, biodiversity and animal welfare, whilst also supporting farmers in a just transition toward more resilient agricultural models that protect farmer livelihoods and decent working conditions for workers.

We will continue to build upon these efforts and additional initiatives by implementing and scaling regenerative agriculture practices to ensure consistent supplies; increasing farmer productivity, resilience and economic viability, through supporting farmers to improve both milk and crop yields; bolstering animal health and welfare, through improved milking standards and animal nutrition; improving milk infrastructure, through supporting creation of milk collection centers; and exploring new technology and innovations that fit for local needs.

We are committed to achieve this through our Danone Impact Journey framework to ensure that we measure impact for a variety of KPIs. Furthermore, Danone will work with governments, and local stakeholders to drive measurable outcomes with farming partners and local communities. We will also continue to work with coalitions such as Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, and with peers, to accelerate and scale across key supply chains.

Howden is a global insurance group on a mission to use insurance as a force for good by helping individuals, businesses, communities and governments to understand and respond to climate risks, and by finding innovative ways of using insurance as a tool to increase climate resilience. Howden is responding to the PREPARE Call to Action through a commitment to finding scalable ways to empower communities disproportionately affected by climate change to be better financially prepared for disasters.

Working with multi-disciplinary teams of private, public and academic sector experts, and those on the ground responding to disasters, we are developing tangible, scalable models to improve climate resilience and avert, minimize, and address loss and damage by transferring climate risks from vulnerable developing countries onto the balance sheets of the private sector risk markets in developed economies using donor and philanthropic sources to fund premium payments.

Two ways we aim to do this: 1) by modeling, defining and supporting efficient implementation of Loss and Damage related donor funds with risk capital markets to scale up financial protection to 30 Small Island Developing States preventing them from losing no more than 10% of GDP from climate shocks (many currently face losing more than 100% of GDP from climate extremes) and 2) by developing mechanisms that pool private and philanthropic capital to unlock up to $2bn of annual insurance protection capacity for vulnerable communities facing the worst risks and impacts from climate change.

IBM has a strong track record of setting precedents with our environmental commitments for over 50 years and we continue to lead the charge worldwide through our research and solutions. In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, we will launch two initiatives to support vulnerable communities with skills and technology to adapt to climate change.

First, we will unveil the 3rd cohort of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, which will include a new focus on water issues. IBM will contribute $10 million and will work with this group of partners on scaling technology solutions that address water issues for climate-vulnerable communities in areas such as Brazil, India, the Middle East and Africa. Some of these projects leverage cutting-edge solutions, such as the geospatial foundation model -built from NASA’s satellite data- to identify and shrink urban heat islands, sustainably manage land use and water scarcity, and more. IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a pro bono social impact program that applies IBM technologies, such as hybrid cloud and AI, to bolster non-profit and government organization efforts that build environmental and climate resilience.

As part of our commitment to skill 30M people by 2030, IBM will also unveil new free globally available coursework around technology and sustainability. This will help equip practitioners with the knowledge and skills needed in a changing climate. Through our signature education program IBM SkillsBuild, learners will gain access to green and AI skills, case studies, and professional development materials. At course completion, participants will be able to earn IBM-branded digital credentials that are recognized by potential employers.

Jupiter Intelligence supplies climate products to support adaptation by individuals, institutions, and government agencies. Jupiter’s product line includes 90-meter resolution data on eight climate risks—heat, cold, wind, wildfire, flooding, precipitation, drought, and hail—anywhere on the planet. Each peril is expressed in a range of metrics, for several possible climate scenarios and through the year 2100, to allow users to prepare for and adapt to the issues that concern them directly. These hazard projections are paired with economic impact metrics that help quantify tradeoffs for adaptation and mitigation efforts.

Jupiter currently works with some of the largest institutions in the world, supplying climate information to support human health, agriculture, banking, real estate, insurance, pharmaceuticals, energy, and critical infrastructure. Jupiter’s efforts extend to helping indigenous peoples in South America identify their locations most susceptible to changing climate in the coming decades. We also work with local experts in Nepal to develop an early warning system for landslides induced by increasingly heavy rains. Our data are adapted to each global partner to assure the climate information is understandable, useful, and appropriate to support action.

In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Jupiter is committed to expanding its use of data to a total of 100 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia/Pacific regions to assure those most affected by climate change are well prepared with state of the art information to prepare for changes in the most effective and appropriate manner they choose. Jupiter’s commitment includes both the data and the technical support to understand the data representing a philanthropic pledge of at least $1.8M to help the least developed regions, who are often the most vulnerable to natural disasters despite being the least responsible for these effects of human-created climate change.

McCormick, a global flavor company headquartered in the U.S., is responding to the PREPARE Call to Action, and through its Grown for Good framework, is investing in the resilience of over 30,000 farmers across their supply chains. They have set an ambitious 100% sustainable sourcing goal for their top five branded ingredients for 2025 and have already achieved 100% sustainability for their vanilla supply chain sourced from Madagascar.

Milliman, Inc., a global independent risk management, benefits, and technology firm, is committed to addressing issues that have a global impact while focusing on transformative change. Our work and our values are aligned with PREPARE in three critical areas: insurtech innovation, complex climate-related consulting and leadership services, and partnership development focused on capacity-building.

Through the MicroInsurance Centre at Milliman (MIC@M), we will develop and advise on creative and valuable solutions covering a full range of risks for low-income populations services to create sustainable microinsurance products.

Milliman will utilize the resources of the Milliman Climate Resilience Initiative (MCRI), a coalition of industry experts that unites perspectives across industry, government, academic, and not-for-profit sectors, to anticipate and measure climate risks and drive effective responses. Additionally, MCRI will provide thought leadership and cross-industry access to better address global climate change risks collaboratively.

Finally, in partnership with UNDP in 2022, Milliman created the Global Actuarial Initiative (GAIN) to increase foundational actuarial capacity in developing countries. This increased capacity will improve these nations’ ability to assess and address climate-related risks.

As part of PREPARE, GAIN will support sustainable actuarial profession-building efforts in at least ten developing countries through research, virtual exam-focused materials, mentorship programs, work applications training with actuarial experts, enhancing capacity at universities, improving the use of actuaries within the insurance industry, and by advising regulators.

Finally, Milliman commits to working with the insurance industry and government partners to explore alternative financing options for climate adaptation, such as balance sheet investing.

Miyamoto International is a global structural engineering and risk reduction firm with a humanitarian focus. Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to global housing, and we must take action to make our homes and surrounding communities resilient to its impacts. Housing often comprises hundreds of millions of individual assets and remains a challenging and often neglected facet of infrastructure adaptation. To address the critical gap and respond to the PREPARE Call to Action, Miyamoto will create an informal coalition to build understanding about the potential of both indigenous (or “vernacular”, meaning belonging to a specific locality) practices and global technological advances to boost resilience. Examples include a wide spectrum of possibilities, from leveraging local skills and traditional construction practices using bamboo, earth, and nature-based solutions, to availability of AI-powered apps that regulate building codes in hazard zones.

Miyamoto envisions spearheading an informal coalition of U.S. and international architecture, landscape, engineering, urban planning, and construction firms, think tanks, universities and development and assistance actors, to share best practices, research, and technologies. Miyamoto will create a platform to facilitate a learning series, which will include regular dissemination of factsheets and webinars that expand understanding of integrating indigenous and global technologies for climate and disaster resilient housing and communities. This coalition aims to elevate the role of housing in adaptation discourse and provide information about innovative solutions, particularly focusing on application in low- and middle-income countries.

Pula, an agricultural insurance and technology company, is responding to the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE) Call to Action and has committed to increase their coverage to 100 million small holder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa by providing up to $20 billion in insurance coverage by 2026. The smallholder farmers pay $20 for $200 dollars of insurance coverage. Insuring previously uninsured farmers can generate a direct positive impact for farming households across Africa, helping to secure their livelihoods by protecting them against the risk of financial losses due to climate-related events.

Synoptic Data Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) has been aggregating, processing, and disseminating weather and environmental observations for more than a decade. Our mission is to facilitate equitable access to environmental data to enhance public safety, support public and private sector decision-makers, and promote educational research. We accomplish this through various partnerships including one with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as an early implementation partner for the WIS 2.0 international data sharing platform. Additionally, Synoptic is working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ingest and deliver data for the National Mesonet Program (NMP). In 2023, Synoptic created a publicly available Data Viewer to further its mission of democratizing public weather data. As a response to this PREPARE Call to Action, Synoptic pledges to ingest and display 30 new countries into our platform in 2024 leveraging the Global Cache that is operated by Synoptic in strategic partnership with NOAA, UK Met Office and Amazon using AWS infrastructure. The primary focus being the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and regions in the Pacific, Caribbean and Africa. This effort will supplement the more than 300 existing networks in our system and provide additional critical data in the developing regions of the world and the communities in those areas that are more vulnerable to climate related disasters. Synoptic Data PBC is committed to helping improve climate resilience for all communities by providing an easily accessible digital platform for weather and climate information.

Tomorrow.io is a weather intelligence software company that innovates across the entire value chain of weather from operating its own proprietary weather satellites, to developing novel AI driven weather forecast models and delivering actionable weather insights to industry and governments around the world. Tomorrow.io proudly responds to the PREPARE Call to Action with our innovative Horizon initiative. This program is set to transform climate information dissemination and early warning systems globally. Horizon brings to the table unparalleled space-based observational technology, sophisticated AI modeling, and actionable weather insights and tools, all designed to seamlessly integrate with current meteorological infrastructure to elevate weather forecasting in developing nations.

Tomorrow.io’s tools focus on adapting to the near-term risk of extreme weather through better, more informed decision making and more accurate weather forecasting across all sectors of the economy.

With a firm resolve to contribute our resources and galvanize private investment, our goal is to bring the Horizon program and over $100 million of investment to 10 of the most climate-vulnerable African countries within the next five years. These collaborations are a testament to our mission to make cutting-edge meteorological services universally available, ensuring that every country, regardless of economic status, is equipped to confront the challenges posed by climate change.

Visa is committed to using the power of our network to enable individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive. We believe in the importance of helping to protect our planet, and we play a critical role in supporting financial inclusion efforts in the more than 200 countries and territories where we operate. Our partnerships with development institutions enable the quick, easy, and secure flow of payments to the most vulnerable communities in times of need. This includes payment solutions to help ensure that small businesses have the resources they need to do business, especially when there is a crisis.

Visa and Oxfam America intend to collaborate to scale Oxfam’s Building Resilient, Adaptive and Disaster-Ready Communities (B-READY) project, which provides humanitarian assistance to individuals, communities, and businesses before a disaster strikes. We intend to scale B-READY to create a mobile-based payment solution infrastructure to digitize humanitarian payments to help families, individuals, and businesses protect themselves and their assets. Combining data-driven insights from Visa with Oxfam’s record of predictive modeling can help provide advance warning of major disasters to trigger fast and secure payments to families, individuals, and small businesses in affected communities. By integrating Visa Direct, which provides a single point of access to billions of endpoints, and Visa Government Prepaid, B-READY will be able to help build resiliency and decrease the impact of emergencies on people, homes, and businesses.

Investing in solutions and partnerships that support climate adaptation and resilience aligns with Visa’s purpose to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Xylem is a global water technology company that is privileged to support climate adaptation in communities across the globe by deploying innovative technology in partnership with customers and communities. By deploying our innovative technologies and solutions, our customers can mitigate water scarcity, reduce water loss, and optimize water systems to improve water affordability. Additionally, our solutions help prevent stormwater pollution, predict and protect against flooding, and lower greenhouse gas emissions, all contributing to making communities and their water systems more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

But this is only the beginning. Industrial manufacturing has both a responsibility and an opportunity to increase its efforts toward climate adaptation through water stewardship. In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Xylem, through our recent acquisition of Evoqua, is committed to expanding the global footprint of technologies designed for industrial climate adaptation, including water use efficiency, wastewater management, and recycling/reuse. Xylem will target regions within Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia to further expand the presence of these solutions.

Additional Partners

The total cost of adaptation is a function not only of how fast we reduce emissions, but also how fast we innovate the technologies, products, and services needed to make households, communities, and value chains resilient to inevitable impacts. Because resilience is today framed entirely as a cost rather than a return-delivering investment, too little finance, innovation, and entrepreneurial talent is currently flowing toward it. Consistent with the PREPARE Call to Action, a group of leading investment and research companies and non-profits is coming together to redefine and demonstrate climate resilience as an attractive investment theme. The collaboration includes the Bezos Earth Fund, ClimateWorks Foundation, the Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Working Group (GARI), the Lightsmith Group, and the MSCI Sustainability Institute. We believe the market for climate resilience solutions is already large and is set to grow rapidly as businesses develop the technologies, products, and services that will be in greater demand in a world of rising temperatures and climatic volatility. In the coming months, we will set out an investment framework for climate resilience solutions as a thematic growth market; help quantify the size and scope of relevant technologies and sub-sectors; outline how investors in public markets can gain exposure to this theme; and support investment managers to market some of the world’s first investment strategies focused on climate resilience solutions. These steps will include GARI publishing a peer-reviewed updated framework for identifying companies that support climate resilience and adaptation that for the first time will be applicable to the full range of publicly listed and privately held companies. The work will also specifically focus on climate resilience solutions as a thematic growth area in emerging and developing markets.

Private Sector Responses in 2022

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful. In 2018, as part of its Crisis Response program, Google began a flood forecasting initiative to help combat the catastrophic damage from riverine floods in the United States. This equipped those in harm’s way with accurate and detailed alerts. In parallel to this Call to Action, Google will begin coverage for floods occurring in 18 new countries, 15 of those in Africa: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Angola, South Sudan, Namibia, Liberia, and South Africa. Google will moreover work with the U.S. government, national hydrometeorological services, and other key stakeholders affected by floods to co-create locally tailored services and improve the accuracy of alerts. And we’re working to expand our Environmental Insights Explorer’s Tree Canopy Insights tool to hundreds of cities by the end of this year so they can use trees to lower street-level temperatures and improve quality of life.

The insurance industry has unique risk finance, analytics and management capabilities that will be critical to enabling vulnerable communities to understand and act upon evolving physical risks associated with climate change. Marsh McLennan, together with the UN Race to Resilience, the UN High-Level Champions, and Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, will launch a new insurance and adaptation mobilization campaign seeking to engage the industry in an effort to scale its role in supporting climate risk reduction and adaptation. The campaign starts by showcasing 17 Pioneer Programs in dozens of countries that illustrate the new models, approaches and tools being developed to de-risk, finance and advance community-level risk reduction. In addition, this work aims to help standardize and potentially even quantify insurers’ impact on climate risk reduction, and develop deeper dialogue among insurance leaders on how to institutionalize a longer-term approach to scaling the industry’s role in climate adaptation.

Mastercard operates at the intersection of people and the planet, driving forward efforts to ensure a digital economy founded on inclusivity and sustainability. Within this work, Mastercard is forging a new partnership with BFA Global dedicated to scaling a new field- building effort to accelerate innovative fintech-enabled solutions that help vulnerable households and enterprises build resilience and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The partnership will support the launch of a new climate-smart product innovation hub and strengthen learning and community-building efforts. Mastercard has also made a commitment to bringing 30 million people onto its Community Pass platform over the next five years. This effort provides smallholder farmers with access to a digital platform that connects them to a stable marketplace to sell their produce, provides them quality inputs and climate-smart agricultural advisory services to increase productivity and enables them with a digital ID and credit building opportunities as a part of the formal financial system. Furthermore, recognizing more than two-thirds of the population of the tropics — about 2.7 billion people — directly depend on nature for at least one of their most basic needs, Mastercard created the Priceless Planet Coalition to restore 100 million trees in essential forests across the globe.

Microsoft is working with partners in Kenya and Egypt on the first global expansion of the AI for Good Research Lab, which will create a new team of data scientists on the ground in Africa that will work to turn data into action. Providing governments and decision-makers in the Global South with access to reliable climate data is key to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. To inform this work, together with the African Development Bank, African Climate Foundation, and African Risk Capacity Microsoft will establish a new Africa AI Innovation Council which will convene a high-level, multi-sector group of leaders to improve climate resilience in Africa. Further through an expanded collaboration between the AI for Good Data Lab and Planet, Africa-based data scientists will leverage satellite imagery of Africa to address challenges nominated by the AI Innovation Council with a special focus on adaptation and early warning systems.

In 2023, Microsoft opened its AI for Good Lab hub in Kenya. This team of data scientists is applying AI to accelerate sustainability solutions in Africa with African partners. After the formation of the Africa AI Innovation Council to help inform the Lab’s work in 2022, the Council officially launched with an in-person summit in Nairobi, featuring Council members African Development Bank, African Climate Foundation, and African Risk Capacity, as well as a multi-sector group of leaders. This group continues to convene and innovate new technological approaches to improve climate resilience in Africa.

Updated as of November 2023.

WTW is a global risk management, insurance, human capital and investment adviser with 45,000 people in over 100 countries. Working with UN Agencies since 2010 to support climate resilience, the company led the creation of the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), incubated the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment (CCRI), and founded the WTW Research Network (WRN) in 2006 to enable open, practical, academic climate research. WTW has also implemented the most innovative parametric insurance solutions to protect exposed ecosystems and communities in the world’s most vulnerable regions. To empower the PREPARE program, WTW commits our expertise and resources to drive and support development of the Global Resilience Index Initiative (GRII) planned to be fully launched at COP28 by the IDF and UNDRR. The GRII, our most ambitious collaboration to date, will provide open reference data, metrics and projections of climate resilience for all countries worldwide. This critical missing layer of the world’s information architecture can support people, policymakers, and businesses to understand climate risks, and provide a basis for financing measures to adapt to and build resilience against climate change. The GRII also enables greater transparency on the impacts of financial flows to begin to shift capital toward activities that support climate resilient development.

Gro Intelligence provides real-time, global data and AI-driven analytics that illuminate the complex interplay between the Earth’s climate, environment, and economy helping key decision makers in business, government, and the nonprofit sector address the twin challenges of our day: increasing global food security and mitigating the impact of climate change. In response to the Call to Action, Gro commits to expanding its Gro For Good program that supports, worldwide, academic and non-profit research focused on developing a sustainable global food system that is resilient to climate change. In alignment with the PREPARE Action Plan, Gro also commits its continued support of objectives outlined by US agencies and other governments in their efforts to build, maintain, and deploy climate information services and early warning systems that will enable their citizens to make informed decisions about how to address the risks posed by a changing climate.

Building community is at the heart of accelerating resilience and adapting to climate change. Meta technologies reach 3 billion people globally, including some of the communities most on the frontlines of climate change. We conduct ongoing climate-related risk and opportunity assessments to help us take the right measures to build our company’s and our world’s resilience to changes that are already happening. Meta’s commitment to action on climate adaptation and resilience includes:

1. Operations: We are integrating climate risk and resilience assessment findings into key business decisions such as site selection and infrastructure development and partner with local communities to enhance climate resilience.
2. People: We also integrate climate risk and resilience into our employee preparedness programs to provide proactive actions employees and their households can take to be more prepared for climate-related, natural and other hazards we may face.
3. Supply chain: We work with our supply chain partners to ensure they have the tools to identify and manage the climate risks they may face. Assessing resilience to climate change is crucial to guiding our efforts to ensure the people and communities within our supply chain are prepared for climate risks.
4. Product innovation: We worked with partners to help launch our first Climate Science Literacy Initiative. Its goal is to pre-bunk climate misinformation by running ads across our apps and services that feature five of the most common techniques used to misrepresent climate change.
5. Partnerships: We amplified our climate resilience initiatives at COP27 by launching the PREPARE Call to Action on Adaptation in partnership with the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development alongside Microsoft, Google, Mastercard and others. We also supported the Resilience Hub and organized a panel about the role of technology in building climate resilience.

Updated as of November 2023.

Pegasus Capital Advisors, L.P. is a leading global private markets impact investment manager which has concentrated on climate mitigation and adaptation investments for over 15 years. As the first U.S. private equity fund manager accredited by the Green Climate Fund, Pegasus is dedicated to fostering sustainable and inclusive growth while providing attractive returns for investors. In emerging markets Pegasus is focused on green infrastructure, sustainable agriculture & ocean production, ecotourism, energy transition & efficiency and recycling. Pegasus seeks to deliver systematic change and impact at scale through its investments, thought leadership, and purpose-led public-private partnerships. In response to this call to action, Pegasus intends to mobilize more than $500 million to invest in adaptation strategies to reduce risks for communities in countries most vulnerable to climate change through the Global Subnational Climate Fund and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs, two blended finance initiatives whose investments are managed by Pegasus and anchored by the Green Climate Fund. Pegasus will seek to scale its investments activities that include, for example, utility scale solar and battery storage in the Dominican Republic and distributed solar energy in Mexico, Indonesia, and South Africa to foster a secure and affordable supply of clean energy, ecotourism as an adaptation strategy in Ecuador and Bahamas with integrated conservation and restoration efforts to protect natural habitat, and agroforestry projects in Jamaica and other countries in LAC and Africa for increased food security while simultaneously addressing climate change, biodiversity conservation, and social well-being.

PepsiCo Positive (pep+) is a strategic, end-to-end transformation of our business with sustainability and human capital at the centre, including global commitments to regenerative agriculture, sustainable sourcing and livelihood improvement. PepsiCo sources ingredients from approximately 60 countries supporting over 100,000 agricultural jobs. PepsiCo is working to source crops and ingredients in a way that accelerates regenerative agriculture and strengthens farming communities. PepsiCo supports the advancement of farming practices to optimize crop yields, respect human rights, improve livelihoods, build resilience to the negative impacts of climate change and secure supply. Examples of PepsiCo’s work across the globe in supporting adaptation and resilience to climate change:

To address the risks of climate change and build resilience with their potato farmers, PepsiCo is driving irrigation water use efficiency in areas under high water stress through their Regenerative Agriculture and Livelihood programs in the Africa, Middle East and South Asia regions. This has resulted in improved irrigation efficiency for potatoes by 32% vs. 2015, avoiding the use of 5 billion liters of water in 2021 vs. 2020.

PepsiCo has also created the Positive Agriculture Outcomes (PAO) Fund, which provides grants to support innovative projects across different countries to advance PepsiCo’s ambition to spread regenerative practices. For example, PepsiCo is studying potato fields to determine which cover crops are most beneficial for potato farmers. These insights will inform their regenerative work with potato farmers around the world.

PepsiCo will work with the U.S. government and local stakeholders to continue to implement climate-smart agricultural programs.

SAP’s purpose is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives with sustainability at the core. SAP will develop digital tools to help with adaptation, resilience, and preparedness in local communities. SAP is committed to developing data driven solutions around climate adaptation and resilience in key areas such as health, infrastructure, water and more including enabling pathways for employment and entrepreneurship in the green and digital transition. SAP will focus on offering agile, real-time application and visualization of data via analysis, prediction, and simulation for adaptation. SAP works on disaster prevention planning using design thinking and improves awareness through training and education. SAP also supports climate preparedness and response through targeted corporate social responsibility engagements.