Investments in climate adaptation and resilience are increasingly shaped by complex, interacting risks spanning environmental change, geopolitical instability, and technological disruption. These dynamics create deep uncertainty and contested values, challenging conventional approaches to policy, planning, and finance. This editorial introduces a Focus Issue that examines how governance arrangements influence the definition, negotiation, and translation of risks and values into investment decisions. Drawing on 14 case studies from diverse global contexts, we show that the central barrier to climate resilient investment is not a lack of data or finance, but the absence of governance systems capable of structuring uncertainty, aligning actors across scales, and managing distributional consequences. The contributions are organised around three domains: institutional transitions and polycentric governance; financing and market innovations; and place-based system transformations, alongside cross-cutting insights on power, capability, and learning. Across the cases, a consistent pattern emerges: resilience becomes investable when uncertainty is transformed into decision-relevant choices, when institutional rules enable coordination and adaptation, and when the distribution of costs and benefits is made explicit. However, progress is frequently constrained by incumbent actors and entrenched regimes of truth, rule, and wealth accumulation. We conclude by outlining an agenda for ‘investable resilience’ centred on governance reform, missionoriented finance, and capability development. This agenda emphasises the need to move beyond project-level solutions towards systemic approaches that enable sustained, scalable, and equitable climate-resilient transitions.
By Stefanos Xenarios, Russell M Wise, Serik Orazgaliyev, Cecilia Tortajada, Phoebe Koundouri and Eduardo Jr Araral. Article published in Environmental Research Letters, Volume 21, 130201. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ae8286