Trine Stausgaard Munk, Alvaro Fonseca
21 October 2025
What if we unlock the potential of climate resilience together?
Science is clear. Climate change is real, it is here, and it is accelerated by human activity.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we will face long-term shifts in global weather patterns, as well as more frequent and intense extreme weather events in the future.
Communities and places will be affected in disproportional and often unjust ways by climate change. Not only due to the geographical location or the physical conditions of place, but also because of socio-economic, cultural and historical aspects as well as local policies and regulations. These underlying, place-based characteristics are central to our journey towards resilience. Yet too often, these aspects are underestimated or overlooked, and we fail to unlock the full potential of our climate resilience efforts and investments.
Unfolding the complexities of physical climate risks
The IPCC defines physical climate risk as the potential for adverse consequences from the impacts of climate change, resulting from the interaction of the climate-related hazard (the probability of an event), exposure (people or assets in harm's way), and vulnerability (susceptibility to harm and capacity to respond). Bearing this definition in mind, we must work to identify which climate-related hazards – such as heatwaves, floods, and storms – are relevant to a given place and how often they occur. We must also understand how these hazards affect assets, ecosystems, and the value-chain, and how communities and organisations can effectively prepare for, adapt to, and recover from an event.
To cultivate climate resilience, we can focus on reducing exposure, reducing vulnerability, or reducing both. Reducing exposure often centers on familiar infrastructure-based solutions. To reduce vulnerabilities, we must diversify interventions to also include non-structural initiatives, such as capacity-building, rezoning, strategic upskilling, and emergency preparedness. Working with an offset in vulnerabilities reaches far beyond climate risk reductions into issues of equity and justice, addressing the systemic inequalities that shape who bears the greatest burden and who has the fewest resources to prepare, adapt, respond, and recover.
Many current design practices are outdated and unfit for our current planetary complexities and future climate variability. We cannot rely on the same high-emission, high-resource consuming methods of our industrial past if we want a sustainable and just transition to a future climate. We need to challenge “one-size-fits-all”, static infrastructure standards, and business as usual approaches. Instead, we should invite in place-sourced designs, a diversity of interventions that together bring about resilience.
The World Economic Forum identify inaction and maladaptation as top global risks, along with climate change related hazards, underscoring both the urgency of acting now as well as acting wisely.
So, how do we design for a more equitable, climate resilient future?
Small actions can lead to big impacts. However, it is important to know where we are heading and how to advance. Our paths towards resilience will be subject to external socio-economic and climatic changes. Outlining adaptive pathways as a guiding compass will be key to maintaining overall direction in a constantly shifting environment. We recommend four steps to co-create climate resilience pathways:
-
Co-explore climate risks
We apply local climate knowledge and downscaled projections to identify which climate hazards are relevant for a given place, both today and in the future. We identify “who” and “what” can be exposed to each hazard, we map systems and patterns of place, and we dive into their unique vulnerabilities. Understanding the potential consequences of an exposed site, critical infrastructure, system, or asset is key to unlocking the potentials of climate resilience. - Co-create resilience visions
We engage stakeholders, communities, and nature to collectively formulate visions that harmonise with place. We host dialogs on acceptable levels of risk, distribution of burdens, and potential strategies. We collectively identify actions and interventions that are locally suitable and respond directly to the physical climate risks and the underlying place-based conditions. We combine a diversity of interventions in flexible networks and prioritise multi-purpose and ecosystem-centric designs to advance resilience. In doing so, we aim to increase adaptive capacity, create connections, and incentivise ownership of strategies and interventions with everyone involved. We do this through the recognition that social cohesion and local anchoring are fundamental aspects of successful climate resilience.
- Co-evaluate systemic impact
We evaluate proposed interventions, their connectivity, and impact through additional modeling and assessments. We quantify the value of prioritising multi-purpose and nature-based designs, and we document the residual climate risk to provide recommendations for both emergency preparedness and response. We engage stakeholders in conversations around distribution of risk and benefits, implementation sequencing, and prioritisation, both spatially and temporally. We work iteratively across step 2 and 3 until the proposed strategies and interventions align with acceptable levels of risk and the overall community resilience vision. - Co-cultivate resilience pathways
Together with stakeholders we design adaptive pathways, that are dynamic and adjustable over time, and where strategies are planned in relation to expected trigger points and future uncertainties. We combine visions, designs, investments (costs), reduced climate risks (benefits), and the added value that multi-purpose, nature-positive interventions bring about in a cost-benefit analysis and investment statement. This will serve as the guiding compass through societal, political, or climatic shifts securing long-term commitment and governance, cultivating engagement, and incentivising sustained co-financing and implementation.
Our 4-step approach is scalable to place and has been applied with stakeholders and communities in cities such as Copenhagen (Denmark), Singapore, New York City and Washington, DC (USA), Sibu (Malaysia), and Oslo (Norway). It combines technical expertise, with genuine creativity, and compassionate co-creation with an offset in the uniqueness of place.
Our call to action
Too often, climate resilience efforts fall short by stopping at hazard exposure, identifying which climate hazards could pose a risk. But this only tells part of the story. It does not reveal whether assets, systems, or populations are at risk, or how. To get there, we must ask deeper questions: What exactly is exposed? Why and how is it exposed? And to which degree?
Answering these questions requires broadening the scope beyond adapting isolated assets, such as buildings, and critical infrastructure to include the livelihoods of citizens, the well-being of vulnerable groups, and the survival and thriving conditions of natural habitats. It requires activating our systemic awareness and foresight, to work with the systems of place, rather than against them. Focusing on the connections and relationships of place, rather than individual assets or parts.
Working with resilience is working at the heart of collaboration. Collaborating with nature, and with each other, as interconnected and interdependent systems. We leave our competitiveness in the past and activate our empathy towards all life as we embark on our resilience journeys. This will not only require new skills, but also new mindsets and perspectives. A relearning of our role as engineers and designers as resilience weavers – cultivating conditions conducive to life. All life. In collaborative networks. Because resilience is something we co-create together.
Our call to action is this: please help us unlock the full potential of climate resilience by directly addressing the underlying vulnerabilities that shape real-world impacts. Try asking: how is this exposed habitat, portfolio, asset or community vulnerable to climate change? And why?
Only then can we start addressing the root causes of climate injustice and foster long-term resilience. We look forward to collaboratively envisioning and designing for a resilient future with you. Join us in becoming resilience weavers!
Want to know more?
Marianne Skov
Senior Specialist
+45 51 61 35 27
Emory Lee
Climate Resilience Lead
Shelby Smith
Senior Planner