PREPARE Call to Action to the Private Sector

31 companies and partners have responded to the PREPARE Call to Action, since its launch at COP27. GRP together with USAID and with input from the Office of the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy are collaborating on the Call.

Drought resistant maize in Uganda, Stephen Lomugemoi in his field. Photographer Ezra Millstein, Mercy Corps

In their role leading the implementation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE), Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Samantha Power and John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate announced a global Call to Action for businesses to make new, significant commitments to signal the critical importance of building climate resilience in partner countries at COP27. 

As part of the Call to Action, 10 companies announced specific responses  to support steps that improve climate resilience for consumers and communities at COP27 with an additional 21 companies and partners responding to the call at COP28. These responses include expanding climate information, financial products and services for adaptation, climate smart food security, and insurance. The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), through the support it receives from USAID, implements the Call to Action to the Private Sector, with input from the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy on Climate. For more information on PREPARE, please visit whitehouse.gov/PREPARE.

This Call to Action recognizes the urgent need for both private and public sector action to address long-standing gaps in climate adaptation. It also acknowledges the progress on reducing emissions resulted, in part, from over a decade of public and private sector collaboration and that strong collaboration with attention to the needs of local communities, can drive further action on global climate resilience. 

For these reasons, Secretary Kerry and Administrator Power have called on the private sector to draw on its unique resources, expertise, and innovation to support inclusive approaches to climate adaptation. Together, the private and public sector can remove barriers to investment in adaptation and build a future in which communities are able to thrive, even in the face of climate change. 

GRP’s role is to connect the companies to the best available resilience and adaptation science, supports with the latest advances in resilience measurement, and links the Call across our partners and with our commitment to the Locally Led Adaptation Principles of which we are a founding signatory.’

 Companies responding to the Call to Action

Companies that responded to  the PREPARE Call to Action to the Private Sector include AON, Arup, BCG, Blue Marble, Danone, Howden, IBM, Jupiter Intelligence, McCormick, Milliman, Miyamoto, Pula, Synoptic, Tomorrow.io, Visa, XylemGoogle, Gro Intelligence, Marsh McLennan, Mastercard, Meta, Microsoft, Pegasus Capital Advisors, PepsiCo., WTW, and SAP.  Additional partners on the PREPARE Call to Action include Bezos Earth Fund, ClimateWorks Foundation, the Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Working Group (GARI), the Lightsmith Group, and the MSCI Sustainability Institute.

Private Sector responses in 2023:  

AON 

Aon is a leading global professional services firm that exists to shape decisions for the better – to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world. Aon’s 50,000 colleagues support our clients’ climate resiliency through advanced analytics and innovation to match risk to capital.

Aon is delighted to work with the Global Resilience Partnership, USAID and the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate to respond to PREPARE. Aon welcomes the opportunity to support PREPARE and the President’s agenda to help companies and communities transition to a nature-positive, climate-resilient world, as a significant reallocation of capital will be required for a transition to a low carbon economy and enhanced community stability.

In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Aon is announcing a collaboration with the African Development Bank. Very few farmers in Africa are insured against the impacts of climate and Aon’s work is designed to support the expansion of crop insurance coverage across the continent, starting with the small-scale producers that serve as the first mile of global and regional food supply chains.

Operating across the continent, this project intends to leverage emerging technologies, such as the innovative African satellite and AI data provider Amini, to expand crop insurance coverage, foster climate resilience and financial inclusion for smallholder farmers, while encouraging them to practice water efficiency and regenerative agriculture.

Aon will focus on assisting with development of the local insurance market, with the goal of bringing innovative insurance products and expanded insurance capacity across the continent, supporting the African Climate Risk and Insurance Facility for Adaptation facility (ACRIFA). ACRIFA’s focus is at the intersection of agri-food systems, climate change, and insurance and the African Development Bank’s mission is to mobilize USD $25bn in climate finance between 2020-2025. Aon and the African Development Bank will work together in an effort to harness a unique opportunity to leverage the challenge of escalating climate risks into opportunities for growth and adaptation.

Arup

Arup is a global sustainable development consultancy. A decade ago, we worked with cities and for cities around the world to develop the City Resilience Index (CRI). The CRI provided a revolutionary conceptualisation of urban resilience that has been used to build capacity and target action in over 100 cities benefiting hundreds of millions of people. Ten years on Arup commits to working with partners to refresh the CRI to understand how the landscape of urban shocks and stresses has evolved in the context of increasing climatic vulnerabilities and to apply lessons learnt to support vulnerable cities and their populations continue their resilience journeys.

With urbanisation most rapid in climate vulnerable regions including sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, it is critical that our approaches to building resilience are tailored to and informed by these geographies. Arup commits to growing and building our own capacity and expertise in these geographies, working with our partners and supply-chain to tackle the multifaceted challenges emerging in these regions as well as to facilitate knowledge sharing that contributes to globally relevant innovations that strengthen the resilience of communities and places, aligned to PREPARE’s objectives.

Our suite of digital tools, which includes TerrAIn and Uheat, provides rapid assessment of climatic risks and enables targeted interventions including nature-based solutions. As part of our pledge, Arup commits to further developing these tools for application in vulnerable geographies and to exploring opportunities to facilitate their use by and with local partners and governments thereby enhancing local capacity to tackle climatic hazards.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Boston Consulting Group’s mission is to unlock the potential of those who advance the world. As a global consulting firm, BCG partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities. The firm works with thousands of companies, governments, and civil society organizations on their societal and planetary impact, including work on net zero journeys, critical needs of investing in adaptation and resilience, and a just transition to a green global economy. Today, there is a massive and persistent adaptation and resilience funding gap, delaying implementation of actions and scaling of solutions needed to protect the most vulnerable communities in developing countries. BCG’s contribution to the PREPARE Call to Action aims to provide a compelling business case based on rigorous new analysis to galvanize the private sector to advance climate adaptation and resilience across critical sectors of the global economy. BCG will focus resources and expertise to develop the analytical foundations, evaluate transactions, demystify the benefits and identify pathways for the private sector to invest in this important space. BCG is delivering a flagship report at COP28 that articulates the imperatives and opportunities for private sector investment in adaptation and resilience.

Blue Marble

Blue Marble is a consortium of leading insurance organizations with a mission to create socially impactful and commercially viable insurance solutions for underserved populations. We aim to enable access to insurance and build risk management capacity for these populations along commodity supply-chains. We have strategic partnerships with several like-minded global brands to achieve this objective.

Our commitment to the PREPARE Call to Action to the Private Sector is to support the climate adaptation of underserved populations along commodity supply-chains through innovative insurance solutions and build risk management capacity to enable the mobilization of at least $200 million in climate protection across Latin America, Africa and Asia, impacting the lives of at least 2 million individuals by 2027.

Danone 

Danone is responding to the PREPARE Call to Action through its Regenerative Agriculture & Methane Matters strategies to invest in climate resilience across key agricultural supply chains in approximately 12 countries. Danone is firmly committed to regenerative agriculture and promoting practices that protect soil, water, biodiversity and animal welfare, whilst also supporting farmers in a just transition toward more resilient agricultural models that protect farmer livelihoods and decent working conditions for workers.

We will continue to build upon these efforts and additional initiatives by implementing and scaling regenerative agriculture practices to ensure consistent supplies; increasing farmer productivity, resilience and economic viability, through supporting farmers to improve both milk and crop yields; bolstering animal health and welfare, through improved milking standards and animal nutrition; improving milk infrastructure, through supporting creation of milk collection centers; and exploring new technology and innovations that fit for local needs.

We are committed to achieve this through our Danone Impact Journey framework to ensure that we measure impact for a variety of  KPIs.  Furthermore, Danone will work with governments, and local stakeholders to drive measurable outcomes with farming partners and local communities. We will also continue to work with coalitions such as Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, and with peers, to accelerate and scale across key supply chains.

Howden

Howden is a global insurance group on a mission to use insurance as a force for good by helping individuals, businesses, communities and governments to understand and respond to climate risks, and by finding innovative ways of using insurance as a tool to increase climate resilience.  Howden is responding to the PREPARE Call to Action through a commitment to finding scalable ways to empower communities disproportionately affected by climate change to be better financially prepared for disasters. 

Working with multi-disciplinary teams of private, public and academic sector experts, and those on the ground responding to disasters, we are developing tangible, scalable models to improve climate resilience and avert, minimize, and address loss and damage by transferring climate risks from vulnerable developing countries onto the balance sheets of the private sector risk markets in developed economies using donor and philanthropic sources to fund premium payments. 

Two ways we aim to do this: 1) by modeling, defining and supporting efficient implementation of Loss and Damage related donor funds with risk capital markets to scale up financial protection to 30 Small Island Developing States preventing them from losing no more than 10% of GDP from climate shocks (many currently face losing more than 100% of GDP from climate extremes)  and 2) by developing mechanisms that pool private and philanthropic capital to unlock up to $2bn of annual insurance protection capacity for vulnerable communities facing the worst risks and impacts from climate change.  

IBM

IBM has a strong track record of setting precedents with our environmental commitments for over 50 years and we continue to lead the charge worldwide through our research and solutions. In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, we will launch two initiatives to support vulnerable communities with skills and technology to adapt to climate change.  

First, we will unveil the 3rd cohort of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, which will include a new focus on water issues.  IBM will contribute $10 million and will work with this group of partners on scaling technology solutions that address water issues for climate-vulnerable communities in areas such as Brazil, India, the Middle East and Africa. Some of these projects leverage cutting-edge solutions, such as the geospatial foundation model -built from NASA’s satellite data- to identify and shrink urban heat islands, sustainably manage land use and water scarcity, and more. IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a pro bono social impact program that applies IBM technologies, such as hybrid cloud and AI, to bolster non-profit and government organization efforts that build environmental and climate resilience.  

As part of our commitment to skill 30M people by 2030, IBM will also unveil new free globally available coursework around technology and sustainability. This will help equip practitioners with the knowledge and skills needed in a changing climate. Through our signature education program IBM SkillsBuild, learners will gain access to green and AI skills, case studies, and professional development materials. At course completion, participants will be able to earn IBM-branded digital credentials that are recognized by potential employers.  

Jupiter Intelligence

Jupiter Intelligence supplies climate products to support adaptation by individuals, institutions, and government agencies. Jupiter’s product line includes 90-meter resolution data on eight climate risks—heat, cold, wind, wildfire, flooding, precipitation, drought, and hail—anywhere on the planet. Each peril is expressed in a range of metrics, for several possible climate scenarios and through the year 2100, to allow users to prepare for and adapt to the issues that concern them directly. These hazard projections are paired with economic impact metrics that help quantify tradeoffs for adaptation and mitigation efforts.

Jupiter currently works with some of the largest institutions in the world, supplying climate information to support human health, agriculture, banking, real estate, insurance, pharmaceuticals, energy, and critical infrastructure. Jupiter’s efforts extend to helping indigenous peoples in South America identify their locations most susceptible to changing climate in the coming decades. We also work with local experts in Nepal to develop an early warning system for landslides induced by increasingly heavy rains. Our data are adapted to each global partner to assure the climate information is understandable, useful, and appropriate to support action.

In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Jupiter is committed to expanding its use of data to a total of 100 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia/Pacific regions to assure those most affected by climate change are well prepared with state of the art information to prepare for changes in the most effective and appropriate manner they choose.  Jupiter’s commitment includes both the data and the technical support to understand the data representing a philanthropic pledge of at least $1.8M to help the least developed regions, who are often the most vulnerable to natural disasters despite being the least responsible for these effects of human-created climate change.

McCormick

McCormick, a global flavor company headquartered in the U.S., is responding to the PREPARE Call to Action, and through its Grown for Good framework, is investing in the resilience of over 30,000 farmers across their supply chains. They have set an ambitious 100% sustainable sourcing goal for their top five branded ingredients for 2025 and have already achieved 100% sustainability for their vanilla supply chain sourced from Madagascar.

Milliman

Milliman, Inc., a global independent risk management, benefits, and technology firm, is committed to addressing issues that have a global impact while focusing on transformative change. Our work and our values are aligned with PREPARE in three critical areas: insurtech innovation, complex climate-related consulting and leadership services, and partnership development focused on capacity-building. 

Through the MicroInsurance Centre at Milliman (MIC@M), we will develop and advise on creative and valuable solutions covering a full range of risks for low-income populations services to create sustainable microinsurance products. 

Milliman will utilize the resources of the Milliman Climate Resilience Initiative (MCRI), a coalition of industry experts that unites perspectives across industry, government, academic, and not-for-profit sectors, to anticipate and measure climate risks and drive effective responses. Additionally, MCRI will provide thought leadership and cross-industry access to better address global climate change risks collaboratively. 

Finally, in partnership with UNDP in 2022, Milliman created the Global Actuarial Initiative (GAIN) to increase foundational actuarial capacity in developing countries. This increased capacity will improve these nations’ ability to assess and address climate-related risks. 

As part of PREPARE, GAIN will support sustainable actuarial profession-building efforts in at least ten developing countries through research, virtual exam-focused materials, mentorship programs, work applications training with actuarial experts, enhancing capacity at universities, improving the use of actuaries within the insurance industry, and by advising regulators. 

Finally, Milliman commits to working with the insurance industry and government partners to explore alternative financing options for climate adaptation, such as balance sheet investing.

Miyamoto

Miyamoto International is a global structural engineering and risk reduction firm with a humanitarian focus. Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to global housing, and we must take action to make our homes and surrounding communities resilient to its impacts. Housing often comprises hundreds of millions of individual assets and remains a challenging and often neglected facet of infrastructure adaptation. To address the critical gap and respond to the PREPARE Call to Action, Miyamoto will create an informal coalition to build understanding about the potential of both indigenous (or “vernacular”, meaning belonging to a specific locality) practices and global technological advances to boost resilience. Examples include a wide spectrum of possibilities, from leveraging local skills and traditional construction practices using bamboo, earth, and nature-based solutions, to availability of AI-powered apps that regulate building codes in hazard zones.

Miyamoto envisions spearheading an informal coalition of U.S. and international architecture, landscape, engineering, urban planning, and construction firms, think tanks, universities and development and assistance actors, to share best practices, research, and technologies. Miyamoto will create a platform to facilitate a learning series, which will include regular dissemination of factsheets and webinars that expand understanding of integrating indigenous and global technologies for climate and disaster resilient housing and communities. This coalition aims to elevate the role of housing in adaptation discourse and provide information about innovative solutions, particularly focusing on application in low- and middle-income countries.

Pula

Pula, an agricultural insurance and technology company, is responding to the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE) Call to Action and has committed to increase their coverage to 100 million small holder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa by providing up to $20 billion in insurance coverage by 2026. The smallholder farmers pay $20 for $200 dollars of insurance coverage. Insuring previously uninsured farmers can generate a direct positive impact for farming households across Africa, helping to secure their livelihoods by protecting them against the risk of financial losses due to climate-related events.

Synoptic

Synoptic Data Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) has been aggregating, processing, and disseminating weather and environmental observations for more than a decade. Our mission is to facilitate equitable access to environmental data to enhance public safety, support public and private sector decision-makers, and promote educational research. We accomplish this through various partnerships including one with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as an early implementation partner for the WIS 2.0 international data sharing platform. Additionally, Synoptic is working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ingest and deliver data for the National Mesonet Program (NMP). In 2023, Synoptic created a publicly available Data Viewer to further its mission of democratizing public weather data. As a response to this PREPARE Call to Action, Synoptic pledges to ingest and display 30 new countries into our platform in 2024 leveraging the Global Cache that is operated by Synoptic in strategic partnership with NOAA, UK Met Office and Amazon using AWS infrastructure. The primary focus being the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and regions in the Pacific, Caribbean and Africa. This effort will supplement the more than 300 existing networks in our system and provide additional critical data in the developing regions of the world and the communities in those areas that are more vulnerable to climate related disasters. Synoptic Data PBC is committed to helping improve climate resilience for all communities by providing an easily accessible digital platform for weather and climate information.

Tomorrow.io

Tomorrow.io is a weather intelligence software company that innovates across the entire value chain of weather from operating its own proprietary weather satellites, to developing novel AI driven weather forecast models and delivering actionable weather insights to industry and governments around the world. Tomorrow.io proudly responds to the PREPARE Call to Action with our innovative Horizon initiative. This program is set to transform climate information dissemination and early warning systems globally. Horizon brings to the table unparalleled space-based observational technology, sophisticated AI modeling, and actionable weather insights and tools, all designed to seamlessly integrate with current meteorological infrastructure to elevate weather forecasting in developing nations.

Tomorrow.io’s tools focus on adapting to the near-term risk of extreme weather through better, more informed decision making and more accurate weather forecasting across all sectors of the economy.

With a firm resolve to contribute our resources and galvanize private investment, our goal is to bring the Horizon program and over $100 million of investment to 10 of the most climate-vulnerable African countries within the next five years. These collaborations are a testament to our mission to make cutting-edge meteorological services universally available, ensuring that every country, regardless of economic status, is equipped to confront the challenges posed by climate change. 

Visa

Visa is committed to using the power of our network to enable individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive. We believe in the importance of helping to protect our planet, and we play a critical role in supporting financial inclusion efforts in the more than 200 countries and territories where we operate. Our partnerships with development institutions enable the quick, easy, and secure flow of payments to the most vulnerable communities in times of need. This includes payment solutions to help ensure that small businesses have the resources they need to do business, especially when there is a crisis.

Visa and Oxfam America intend to collaborate to scale Oxfam’s Building Resilient, Adaptive and Disaster-Ready Communities (B-READY) project, which provides humanitarian assistance to individuals, communities, and businesses before a disaster strikes. We intend to scale B-READY to create a mobile-based payment solution infrastructure to digitize humanitarian payments to help families, individuals, and businesses protect themselves and their assets. Combining data-driven insights from Visa with Oxfam’s record of predictive modeling can help provide advance warning of major disasters to trigger fast and secure payments to families, individuals, and small businesses in affected communities. By integrating Visa Direct, which provides a single point of access to billions of endpoints, and Visa Government Prepaid, B-READY will be able to help build resiliency and decrease the impact of emergencies on people, homes, and businesses.

Investing in solutions and partnerships that support climate adaptation and resilience aligns with Visa’s purpose to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Xylem

Xylem is a global water technology company that is privileged to support climate adaptation in communities across the globe by deploying innovative technology in partnership with customers and communities. By deploying our innovative technologies and solutions, our customers can mitigate water scarcity, reduce water loss, and optimize water systems to improve water affordability. Additionally, our solutions help prevent stormwater pollution, predict and protect against flooding, and lower greenhouse gas emissions, all contributing to making communities and their water systems more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

But this is only the beginning. Industrial manufacturing has both a responsibility and an opportunity to increase its efforts toward climate adaptation through water stewardship. In response to the PREPARE Call to Action, Xylem, through our recent acquisition of Evoqua, is committed to expanding the global footprint of technologies designed for industrial climate adaptation, including water use efficiency, wastewater management, and recycling/reuse. Xylem will target regions within Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia to further expand the presence of these solutions.

Additional partners:

The total cost of adaptation is a function not only of how fast we reduce emissions, but also how fast we innovate the technologies, products, and services needed to make households, communities, and value chains resilient to inevitable impacts. Because resilience is today framed entirely as a cost rather than a return-delivering investment, too little finance, innovation, and entrepreneurial talent is currently flowing toward it. Consistent with the PREPARE Call to Action, a group of leading investment and research companies and non-profits is coming together to redefine and demonstrate climate resilience as an attractive investment theme. The collaboration includes the Bezos Earth Fund, ClimateWorks Foundation, the Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Working Group (GARI), the Lightsmith Group, and the MSCI Sustainability Institute. We believe the market for climate resilience solutions is already large and is set to grow rapidly as businesses develop the technologies, products, and services that will be in greater demand in a world of rising temperatures and climatic volatility. In the coming months, we will set out an investment framework for climate resilience solutions as a thematic growth market; help quantify the size and scope of relevant technologies and sub-sectors; outline how investors in public markets can gain exposure to this theme; and support investment managers to market some of the world’s first investment strategies focused on climate resilience solutions. These steps will include GARI publishing a peer-reviewed updated framework for identifying companies that support climate resilience and adaptation that for the first time will be applicable to the full range of publicly listed and privately held companies. The work will also specifically focus on climate resilience solutions as a thematic growth area in emerging and developing markets.

Companies that responded in 2022:

Google

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful. In 2018, as part of its Crisis Response program, Google began a flood forecasting initiative to help combat the catastrophic damage from riverine floods in the United States. This equipped those in harm’s way with accurate and detailed alerts. In parallel to this Call to Action, Google will begin coverage for floods occurring in 18 new countries, 15 of those in Africa: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Angola, South Sudan, Namibia, Liberia, and South Africa. Google will moreover work with the U.S. government, national hydrometeorological services, and other key stakeholders affected by floods to co-create locally tailored services and improve the accuracy of alerts. And we’re working to expand our Environmental Insights Explorer’s Tree Canopy Insights tool to hundreds of cities by the end of this year so they can use trees to lower street-level temperatures and improve quality of life.

Marsh McLennan

The insurance industry has unique risk finance, analytics and management capabilities that will be critical to enabling vulnerable communities to understand and act upon evolving physical risks associated with climate change. Marsh McLennan, together with the UN Race to Resilience, the UN High-Level Champions, and Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, will launch a new insurance and adaptation mobilization campaign seeking to engage the industry in an effort to scale its role in supporting climate risk reduction and adaptation. The campaign starts by showcasing 17 Pioneer Programs in dozens of countries that illustrate the new models, approaches and tools being developed to de-risk, finance and advance community-level risk reduction. In addition, this work aims to help standardize and potentially even quantify insurers’ impact on climate risk reduction, and develop deeper dialogue among insurance leaders on how to institutionalize a longer-term approach to scaling the industry’s role in climate adaptation.

Mastercard

Mastercard operates at the intersection of people and the planet, driving forward efforts to ensure a digital economy founded on inclusivity and sustainability. Within this work, Mastercard is forging a new partnership with BFA Global dedicated to scaling a new field- building effort to accelerate innovative fintech-enabled solutions that help vulnerable households and enterprises build resilience and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The partnership will support the launch of a new climate-smart product innovation hub and strengthen learning and community-building efforts. Mastercard has also made a commitment to bringing 30 million people onto its Community Pass platform over the next five years. This effort provides smallholder farmers with access to a digital platform that connects them to a stable marketplace to sell their produce, provides them quality inputs and climate-smart agricultural advisory services to increase productivity and enables them with a digital ID and credit building opportunities as a part of the formal financial system. Furthermore, recognizing more than two-thirds of the population of the tropics — about 2.7 billion people — directly depend on nature for at least one of their most basic needs, Mastercard created the Priceless Planet Coalition to restore 100 million trees in essential forests across the globe.

Microsoft

Microsoft is working with partners in Kenya and Egypt on the first global expansion of the AI for Good Research Lab, which will create a new team of data scientists on the ground in Africa that will work to turn data into action. Providing governments and decision-makers in the Global South with access to reliable climate data is key to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. To inform this work, together with the African Development Bank, African Climate Foundation, and African Risk Capacity Microsoft will establish a new Africa AI Innovation Council which will convene a high-level, multi-sector group of leaders to improve climate resilience in Africa. Further through an expanded collaboration between the AI for Good Data Lab and Planet, Africa-based data scientists will leverage satellite imagery of Africa to address challenges nominated by the AI Innovation Council with a special focus on adaptation and early warning systems.

In 2023, Microsoft opened its AI for Good Lab hub in Kenya. This team of data scientists is applying AI to accelerate sustainability solutions in Africa with African partners. After the formation of the Africa AI Innovation Council to help inform the Lab’s work in 2022, the Council officially launched with an in-person summit in Nairobi, featuring Council members African Development Bank, African Climate Foundation, and African Risk Capacity, as well as a multi-sector group of leaders. This group continues to convene and innovate new technological approaches to improve climate resilience in Africa. 

Updated as of November 2023. 

WTW

WTW is a global risk management, insurance, human capital and investment adviser with 45,000 people in over 100 countries. Working with UN Agencies since 2010 to support climate resilience, the company led the creation of the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), incubated the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment (CCRI), and founded the WTW Research Network (WRN) in 2006 to enable open, practical, academic climate research. WTW has also implemented the most innovative parametric insurance solutions to protect exposed ecosystems and communities in the world’s most vulnerable regions. To empower the PREPARE program, WTW commits our expertise and resources to drive and support development of the Global Resilience Index Initiative (GRII) planned to be fully launched at COP28 by the IDF and UNDRR. The GRII, our most ambitious collaboration to date, will provide open reference data, metrics and projections of climate resilience for all countries worldwide. This critical missing layer of the world’s information architecture can support people, policymakers, and businesses to understand climate risks, and provide a basis for financing measures to adapt to and build resilience against climate change. The GRII also enables greater transparency on the impacts of financial flows to begin to shift capital toward activities that support climate resilient development.

Gro Intelligence

Gro Intelligence provides real-time, global data and AI-driven analytics that illuminate the complex interplay between the Earth’s climate, environment, and economy helping key decision makers in business, government, and the nonprofit sector address the twin challenges of our day: increasing global food security and mitigating the impact of climate change. In response to the Call to Action, Gro commits to expanding its Gro For Good program that supports, worldwide, academic and non-profit research focused on developing a sustainable global food system that is resilient to climate change. In alignment with the PREPARE Action Plan, Gro also commits its continued support of objectives outlined by US agencies and other governments in their efforts to build, maintain, and deploy climate information services and early warning systems that will enable their citizens to make informed decisions about how to address the risks posed by a changing climate.

Meta

Building community is at the heart of accelerating resilience and adapting to climate change. Meta technologies reach 3 billion people globally, including some of the communities most on the frontlines of climate change. We conduct ongoing climate-related risk and opportunity assessments to help us take the right measures to build our company’s and our world’s resilience to changes that are already happening. Meta’s commitment to action on climate adaptation and resilience includes: 

  1. Operations: We are integrating climate risk and resilience assessment findings into key business decisions such as site selection and infrastructure development and partner with local communities to enhance climate resilience. 
  2. People: We also integrate climate risk and resilience into our employee preparedness programs to provide proactive actions employees and their households can take to be more prepared for climate-related, natural and other hazards we may face. 
  3. Supply chain: We work with our supply chain partners to ensure they have the tools to identify and manage the climate risks they may face. Assessing resilience to climate change is crucial to guiding our efforts to ensure the people and communities within our supply chain are prepared for climate risks. 
  4. Product innovation: We worked with partners to help launch our first Climate Science Literacy Initiative. Its goal is to pre-bunk climate misinformation by running ads across our apps and services that feature five of the most common techniques used to misrepresent climate change. 
  5.  Partnerships: We amplified our climate resilience initiatives at COP27 by launching the PREPARE Call to Action on Adaptation in partnership with the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development alongside Microsoft, Google, Mastercard and others. We also supported the Resilience Hub and organized a panel about the role of technology in building climate resilience.

Updated as of November 2023. 

Pegasus Capital Advisors

Pegasus Capital Advisors, L.P. is a leading global private markets impact investment manager which has concentrated on climate mitigation and adaptation investments for over 15 years. As the first U.S. private equity fund manager accredited by the Green Climate Fund, Pegasus is dedicated to fostering sustainable and inclusive growth while providing attractive returns for investors. In emerging markets Pegasus is focused on green infrastructure, sustainable agriculture & ocean production, ecotourism, energy transition & efficiency and recycling. Pegasus seeks to deliver systematic change and impact at scale through its investments, thought leadership, and purpose-led public-private partnerships. In response to this call to action, Pegasus intends to mobilize more than $500 million to invest in adaptation strategies to reduce risks for communities in countries most vulnerable to climate change through the Global Subnational Climate Fund and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs, two blended finance initiatives whose investments are managed by Pegasus and anchored by the Green Climate Fund. Pegasus will seek to scale its investments activities that include, for example, utility scale solar and battery storage in the Dominican Republic and distributed solar energy in Mexico, Indonesia, and South Africa to foster a secure and affordable supply of clean energy, ecotourism as an adaptation strategy in Ecuador and Bahamas with integrated conservation and restoration efforts to protect natural habitat, and agroforestry projects in Jamaica and other countries in LAC and Africa for increased food security while simultaneously addressing climate change, biodiversity conservation, and social well-being.

PepsiCo

PepsiCo Positive (pep+) is a strategic, end-to-end transformation of our business with sustainability and human capital at the centre, including global commitments to regenerative agriculture, sustainable sourcing and livelihood improvement. PepsiCo sources ingredients from approximately 60 countries supporting over 100,000 agricultural jobs. PepsiCo is working to source crops and ingredients in a way that accelerates regenerative agriculture and strengthens farming communities. PepsiCo supports the advancement of farming practices to optimize crop yields, respect human rights, improve livelihoods, build resilience to the negative impacts of climate change and secure supply. Examples of PepsiCo’s work across the globe in supporting adaptation and resilience to climate change:

  1. To address the risks of climate change and build resilience with their potato farmers, PepsiCo is driving irrigation water use efficiency in areas under high water stress through their Regenerative Agriculture and Livelihood programs in the Africa, Middle East and South Asia regions. This has resulted in improved irrigation efficiency for potatoes by 32% vs. 2015, avoiding the use of 5 billion liters of water in 2021 vs. 2020. 
  2. PepsiCo has also created the Positive Agriculture Outcomes (PAO) Fund, which provides grants to support innovative projects across different countries to advance PepsiCo’s ambition to spread regenerative practices. For example, PepsiCo is studying potato fields to determine which cover crops are most beneficial for potato farmers. These insights will inform their regenerative work with potato farmers around the world. 

PepsiCo will work with the U.S. government and local stakeholders to continue to implement climate-smart agricultural programs. 

SAP

SAP’s purpose is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives with sustainability at the core. SAP will develop digital tools to help with adaptation, resilience, and preparedness in local communities. SAP is committed to developing data driven solutions around climate adaptation and resilience in key areas such as health, infrastructure, water and more including enabling pathways for employment and entrepreneurship in the green and digital transition.  SAP will focus on offering agile, real-time application and visualization of data via analysis, prediction, and simulation for adaptation. SAP works on disaster prevention planning using design thinking and improves awareness through training and education. SAP also supports climate preparedness and response through targeted corporate social responsibility engagements.

For additional information visit: https://www.usaid.gov/climate/adaptation/prepare-call-to-action