The Equator Company promotes this Wednesday, November 11, at COP31 in Antalya, a round-table dedicated to the challenges of building and financing infrastructure resilient to climate change. The session brings together representatives from sectors such as transport, insurance, water, and development banking, with the aim of discussing who bears the risks and how to mobilize investment for climate adaptation.
The debate, titled “Building Climate Resilience: Infrastructure, Risk and Money on the Table,” will take place at 10:00 local time (07:00 in Lisbon), at the Portugal Pavilion, and emerges in a context where adaptation financing remains one of the main points of tension in climate negotiations. At COP30, in Belem, the Parties called for efforts to at least triple funding destined for adaptation by 2035, but without establishing a reference year or identifying who should secure the resources.
The session will feature Rita Nabeiro, president of BCSD Portugal, Franco Caruso, from Grupo Brisa, Rui Esteves, from Fidelidade, Duarte Veiga da Cunha, from AdP Internacional, and Natália Alencar, from Banco Português de Fomento. Moderation will be in charge of Ana Gonçalves, director of operations at The Equator Company. The company’s delegation at COP31 also includes Raquel Almeida, director of the Energy and Carbon practice area.
The starting point is the recognition that climate risks are already affecting infrastructure operators, insurers, and water management entities, often at a pace that exceeds the sectors’ capacity to respond. Among the issues under discussion are the review of infrastructures designed for climatic conditions that have since changed, the distribution of costs associated with damages, the role of public financing in reducing risk for private investment, and the conditions necessary to finance water projects at an international scale.
For Filipe de Morais Vasconcelos, administrator of The Equator Company, “Adaptation and mitigation are today the same investment decision.” The executive considers that the debate on climate finance must move from global targets to concrete project-related questions and the distribution of responsibilities.
“The COP will discuss how much financing is needed for adaptation. Companies, governments and financiers must answer more concrete questions: what is needed to adapt the infrastructures, who assumes the risk, and who finances each project,” he says.
The responsible emphasizes the need to reconcile the adaptation of infrastructures with the reduction of emissions, at a moment when the Turkish presidency of COP31 has placed electrification at the center of the climate action agenda. “Each decarbonization project, in turn, has to be designed for a more extreme climate,” he argues.
Ana Gonçalves also warns about the interdependence of climate risks and the necessity for investments to account for their effects on different sectors of the economy. “Many of the infrastructures that today sustain the economy were designed for a climate that no longer exists, and the risk does not stay inside a single company: a road closure, a power outage, or a water supply failure propagates across the entire chain in a few hours,” she notes.
The operations director of The Equator Company believes that projects must integrate, from the design phase, goals of adaptation and decarbonization, with indicators recognized by investors and insurers. “It is essential to design investments that address both, with metrics that a financier and an insurer recognize,” she adds.
The round-table ends with a commitment from each participant to implement a concrete measure that their organization or sector should pursue in the next 12 months to make climate resilience fundable.
The discussion will continue in Lisbon, on November 17, at the meeting “COP31: From Point to Point,” organized by The Equator Company and BCSD Portugal.
