Adaptation through water: Scaling private sector finance for climate adaptation in Southeast Asia

This report explores how the private sector can accelerate participation and financing for Adaptation through Water (AtW). It highlights the key enablers of bankable AtW solutions globally, including translating resilience into financial value, aggregating projects, aligning risk-return profiles with different forms of capital and establishing robust impact measurement frameworks. Given the fragmented nature of water systems, it also highlights that pathways to effective governance and coordination mechanisms are essential to align public and private stakeholders, structure investable opportunities, and support and scale financing for adaptation.

The report concludes that the challenge in scaling resilience in Southeast Asia is not a lack of solutions, but the ability to make them investable. Across the region, fragmented value capture, limited scale and misaligned incentives keep many projects at the pilot stage rather than moving to replicable implementation.