With the financial community's growing interest in adaptation and resilience, so too have the attempts to narrow down and systematise adaptation into clear categories flourished. The rationale is clear – regulators need clear guidelines on what constitutes adaptation for effective regulation and investors want clear guidelines on whether an investment is adaptation-aligned. The burgeoning number of adaptation taxonomies launched by public and private actors in the past few years is testament to this. Yet, the ever-growing number of adaptation taxonomies and their pluralistic scopes and levels of detail risk jeopardising much-needed clarity on what constitutes adaptation.
The Resilient Planet Finance Lab is the first to compile and systematise a list of adaptation taxonomies. The inventory covers 35+ jurisdictional and non-jurisdictional taxonomies that seek to identify adaptation investments. The inventory, together with a forthcoming analysis, enables the financial sector to identify adaptation-aligned investment opportunities and craft comprehensive adaptation strategies.
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Suggested citation:
Spacey Martín, R., Ranger, N., and England, K. (2024). Adaptation Taxonomy Synthesis, Analysis and Comparison (June 2024). Resilient Planet Finance Lab, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.
Research Articles
The (In)coherence of Adaptation Taxonomies
Adaptation taxonomies are a key tool in the sustainable finance toolkit, creating clarity and coherence around what constitutes an adaptation-aligned investment. Twenty-four adaptation taxonomies have been published in the last 4 years, forcing us to ask the question: clarity or chaos? We compare these taxonomies based on their underlying principles, definitions of adaptation and sector coverage, and reveal major differences.