Key Takeaways
- Food producing landscapes face a widening gap between the cost of climatedriven
disruptions and the finance deployed to build resilience against it - despite
growing evidence that inaction is the costlier path. - This gap reflects not weak economics, but a missing translation: a validated
pathway that connects ecological and social outcomes of resilience investments
to the financial metrics that drive corporate capital allocation. - Existing risk-reward models for investment appraisal are not wrong but
incomplete. We propose the Layered Returns Framework (LRF), paired with a
transmission mechanism that traces financial, market-based, and system-level
returns across stakeholders and, where possible, translates them into investorrelevant
value. - Identifying and financializing this full spectrum of returns broadens the pool
of potential investors, including providers of concessionary capital. Because
different investors have different risk appetites, investment horizons and return
requirements, this diversity lowers the overall cost of capital. - The LRF thus reframes resilience investment from a sustainability mandate into a
strategic capital-allocation decision that stands on its own terms.
