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Sustainability seminar | Financing Resilience: How Capital Is Funding Climate Adaptation in Emerging Economies
Details
The talk will explore how the global approach to financing climate resilience is shifting from aid dependence to market-led investment, influenced by evolving geopolitical dynamics.
It will examine how developing countries and Multilateral Development Banks are engineering bankable adaptation instruments and mobilizing critical financing for flood control, water security facilities, and agricultural resilience in a manner that institutional investors can price and hold.
This session will also dive into how Islamic finance is adding critical depth through asset-backed structures and risk-sharing mechanisms and will discuss the current innovation in how climate vulnerability becomes an investable asset class.
Through real-world examples and project case studies, the session will explore practical questions such as:
How do you structure a $500M urban heat adaptation facility?
What makes a smallholder agricultural resilience fund attractive to pension capital?
How do you blend concessional and commercial tranches to shift billions, not millions?
The session closes with Saudi Arabia's emerging playbook under the Saudi and Middle East Green Initiatives and identifies the practical role academia must play in the hard work of bankability assessment and impact verification that makes any of this credible.
About the speaker
Syed Husain Quadri is Director of the Resilience and Climate Action Department at the Islamic Development Bank, leading climate, disaster risk, fragility, and gender and youth programs across 57 member countries. He has guided efforts that have raised over $2 billion for green sukuk, resilience, and emergency relief programs. He is a regular speaker at COP, UN, and several global finance and development forums. He holds a BSc from King’s College London and an MSc from Imperial College London. He is also a lecturer at Durham University.
*This seminar is presented in collaboration with the Office of Sustainability and the Office of Student Life, strengthening student engagement in campus sustainability initiatives.