About the Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable
The Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable is a group of private, public, research and not-for-profit organisations collaborating to improve the way that the costs and benefits of resilience are valued to create better public and private resilience investment decisions.
Our Mission
INCREASED INVESTMENT IN RESILIENCE-BUILDING PROJECTS TO PROTECT VULNERABLE AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITIES AND ALLOW THEM TO THRIVE IN AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Who we are
The Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable, previously called Resilience Valuation Initiative, was created by the Australian Business Roundtable for Disasters and Safer Communities (ABR). The ABR’s research made it clear that targeted investment in physical and community resilience measures can significantly lessen the costs of disasters.
Despite the increasingly urgent need to invest in resilience, the ABR found that organisations are struggling to identify and apply robust valuation approaches.
The ABR leveraged the collective expertise and relationships of its members to establish the Resilience Valuation Initiative. As the landscape of climate and disaster risk, adaptation and resilience has developed in recent years, the operational context of the Resilience Valuation Initiative shifted. As a result, we have rebranded as the Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable. This reflects our expanded aim to build capability across sectors to use robust approaches that value the benefits and costs of resilience when making resilience investment decisions.
This new name reflects our work as a cross-sectoral collaboration providing a critical forum for diverse organisations to share knowledge and experiences about valuing resilience. We create value for member organisations by supporting them to make informed, future-proofed decisions to manage climate risk and invest now in a resilient, climate-adapted future.
The Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable welcomes more organisations to participate in our work.
How we work
The Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable is a space for leaders and practitioners from different organisations and sectors to come together to share knowledge, experience and expertise.
Our approach is to learn by doing and to work in collaboration with others. We are piloting resilience valuation approaches that recognise the systemic and cascading nature of climate and disaster risk, and take into account a broad range of costs and benefits that encompass environmental, social, economic and governance factors.
We are also developing guidance materials informed by the practical experience that aim to support stakeholders to understand and navigate the landscape of resilience valuation, and provide direction on choosing those most appropriate resource for different contexts and uses.
We will be sharing the learnings, insights and recommendations to enable other organisations to improve the way decisions are made about resilience investment.
We want to build a shared understanding of good resilience investment decision-making that is informed by a broad understanding of the costs and benefits of different resilience investment.
As we learn from practical experience, we are identifying drivers and enablers, and sharing learning about the tools and approaches available. These collected learnings and insights will support organisations to value costs and benefits of resilience as they develop strong businesses cases for informed investment decision-making.
The systemic nature of climate changes spans regions and sectors, and we know that both public and private finance will be required to mobilise the resources needed to adapt and build resilience.
We also know that the best work to build resilience is designed with the unique strengths, challenges and attributes of a place in mind. Taking a place-based approach to resilience means that it looks different in each community or region, and there is no single solution or approach for resilience investment in every context. This means we need to work together to share examples of good practice that can help to inform and guide how resilience is valued in other places and sectors, and work collaboratively on resilience challenges that can span organisations, regions and sectors. The Resilience Valuation Initiative provides a forum share knowledge and work together on these shared challenges.
We are sharing and developing the knowledge and tools needed to make better resilience investment decisions, focusing on approaches that take a systemic approach of the broad costs and benefits of resilience.
Members are learning by doing, collecting insights and learnings from practical experiences to develop cross-sectoral resources. We want it to be standard practice that decisions made about when, where and how to invest public and private capital in resilience are informed by robust valuation approaches.
We are building a community equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to make better resilience investment decisions to ensure that Australian communities can withstand the impacts of disasters and find new and innovative ways to thrive in a changing climate.
Action to date
Why is a coalition so important?
Understanding and improving resilience is a national challenge that requires collaboration.
The coalition approach enables us to:
- Build awareness of methodologies, frameworks and the environment needed;
- Connect to potential users;
- Build credibility to create self-sustaining momentum with users; and
- Create new opportunities for leverage