WHY WE BUILT IT
Traditional cost-benefit analysis was never built for adaptation.
The European Union needs around €70 billion of adaptation investment every year to keep pace with worsening climate hazards. Today, it invests between €20 billion and €33 billion. Closing that gap depends on adaptation managers being able to justify the spend. But the cost-benefit tools they have inherited fall short for three specific reasons.
No standard for ex-ante ROI. You cannot compare what you cannot measure in advance. Historical weather data does not tell you what a measure is worth under a shifting climate.
Benefits are hard to disaggregate. After the fact, tracing avoided losses back to a specific action is difficult, and splitting the benefits between stakeholders is harder still.
Hard to monitor through space and time. Adaptation measures are local and long-lived. Conventional CBA was not built to track them across decades of shifting conditions.
AdaptationReturn closes all these gaps.
"Clear, credible ROI figures for each adaptation measure are essential for sound decision-making and for directing scarce resources where they will yield the greatest risk reduction and value for money."
IN NUMBERS
€822B
EU economic losses from weather and climate extremes, 1980 to 2024
€70B
Annual EU adaptation investment needed through 2050
€25B
Actually invested per year today
HOW IT WORKS
Inputs → Calculation → Output.
AdaptationReturn brings together climate hazard data, site-level exposure and vulnerability, measure performance, and cost structure into a single comparable score. Every input is versioned. Every assumption is documented.
INPUTS
Hazard, exposure, vulnerability, cost
Site-level climate hazard data, physical exposure of each asset, vulnerability characteristics, and the full-cycle cost of each adaptation measure under consideration. Data sources are versioned so any score can be reproduced later.
Calculation
Three dividends, net of cost
For each measure at each site, the platform calculates the financial losses avoided, the reductions in energy costs and emissions achieved, and the social and environmental spillovers delivered, and weighs the total against the measure's full cost over a five-year horizon. Maladaptation risks are identified and flagged.
OUTPUT
A single comparable number
One AdaptationReturn figure per measure, per site. Comparable across measures, across sites, across hazards, across geographies. The shared language of adaptation costs and benefits that standardization has been waiting for.
THE DIFFERENCE
The first ex-ante ROI metric for climate adaptation.
METHODOLOGY
Designed to hold up.
AdaptationReturn was designed from first principles to hold up to the scrutiny of grant officers, council auditors, funders, and research peers. Four principles make that possible.
01
Transparent methodology
The full methodology is documented and available for review. Any practitioner is invited to inspect, audit, or challenge the calculation. Resilens does not ask anyone to trust a black box.
02
Reproducible outputs
Given the same inputs, the same score is produced every time. Every version of the methodology and the underlying data is archived. A score produced today can be reproduced and verified years from now.
03
Site-level granularity
Scores are calculated at the individual site level, not averaged across portfolios. A school with a south-facing roof in an urban heat island gets a different score from one shaded by mature trees, because it should.
04
Standardized frameworks that adapt to on-ground data
Where data is limited, conservative assumptions are applied and flagged, not hidden. No AdaptationReturn score overstates the case. Decision-makers know where the evidence is strong and where uncertainty is larger.