Frequently asked questions
Answers to the questions adaptation managers, funders, and buyers most often ask us.
WHY THIS MATTERS
What is climate adaptation?
Climate adaptation is the process of adjusting buildings, infrastructure, public services, operations, and ecosystems to actual or expected climate impacts in order to reduce harm and improve resilience. In practice, that means preparing for risks such as extreme heat, flooding, drought, storms, and water stress. Climate adaptation matters because climate impacts are already generating major losses: the European Environment Agency estimates that weather- and climate-related extremes caused around €822 billion in losses in the EU between 1980 and 2024, with more than €208 billion of that occurring in 2021–2024 alone.
How is climate adaptation different from mitigation?
Climate mitigation and climate adaptation solve different parts of the climate challenge. Mitigation focuses on limiting climate change itself by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or increasing carbon removals. Adaptation focuses on reducing the damage caused by climate impacts that are already here or increasingly unavoidable, such as overheating buildings, flood-prone sites, service disruptions, or drought-related water stress. Put simply: mitigation reduces the scale of future climate change, while adaptation reduces the losses and disruption caused by climate risks.
Why do adaptation and mitigation both matter?
Because there is no credible climate strategy without both. Stronger mitigation helps limit future warming and reduces how severe climate risks become over time. Adaptation protects people, assets, and services from the risks that are already materializing today. In the WHO European Region, 2024 was the warmest year on record for continental Europe, and 19 of the 23 most severe heatwaves in Europe since 1950 have occurred since 2000. That is why organizations cannot afford to treat adaptation as optional or secondary: even with strong mitigation, they still need to prepare for a hotter, more volatile operating environment.
How is climate change changing risks for buildings, infrastructure, and public services?
Climate change is increasing both acute and chronic risks. Acute risks include heatwaves, heavy rainfall, flooding, storms, and wildfires that can damage buildings, roads, utilities, and operational sites or interrupt essential services. Chronic risks include rising average temperatures, water stress, and shifting seasonal patterns that gradually reduce building performance, increase cooling demand, strain health and care systems, and weaken service reliability over time. European institutions now explicitly warn that storms, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods are already damaging homes, roads, finances, and the wider economy across the EU, while WHO warns that heatwaves significantly increase health risks and pressure on public systems.
What Resilens does
What does Resilens do?
Resilens is a decision engine for climate adaptation. It helps organizations turn fragmented climate risk, vulnerability, and measure data into clear, defensible investment decisions. Rather than stopping at risk analysis, Resilens helps users identify relevant adaptation measures, compare options, and understand which actions are most likely to reduce risk and deliver value across sites and portfolios.
What decisions does Resilens help organisations make?
Resilens helps organizations make practical adaptation decisions at site and portfolio level. These include which sites to prioritize, which climate risks require the most urgent action, which measures are most effective, and where budgets are likely to deliver the strongest return. It supports decisions on how to compare options, sequence investments, and justify adaptation action internally..
Who is Resilens built for?
Resilens is built for organizations that need to assess climate risks to physical sites and make informed adaptation decisions. This includes five core customer segments: cities and municipalities, corporates and facility operators, consultancies and engineering firms, national and regional authorities, and funders or grant bodies. Across all of these groups, the common challenge is the same: rising climate risk, constrained resources, and the need for clear, credible decision support.
What kinds of sites and portfolios can Resilens assess?
Resilens is designed to support the assessment of sites and portfolios across geographies, without being limited to a single country or region. The platform is built for a wide range of physical sites and site types, with an initial focus on social infrastructure such as schools, care facilities, hospitals, and similar public-interest sites. Over time, coverage will expand further, including housing and additional site types.
Which climate hazards does Resilens currently cover?
Resilens currently covers extreme heat. This includes decision support for identifying heat-related risks, understanding vulnerability, and comparing relevant adaptation measures. Additional hazard modules are being developed over time. Flooding is currently in development as the next major module.
What is AdaptationReturn and how is it used in decision-making?
AdaptationReturn is Resilens’ proprietary decision metric for comparing climate adaptation investments across sites and portfolios. It translates complex climate risk into a standardized, ex-ante 5-year ROI, helping organizations understand which measures are likely to deliver the strongest value before they invest. In decision-making, AdaptationReturn is used to compare options, prioritize budgets, support internal approval processes, and build a clearer business case for adaptation.
Why choose Resilens for climate-adaptation decision-making?
Resilens helps organizations move from climate risk analysis to defensible action. Many tools show where risks exist, and many consulting approaches produce valuable one-off studies, but decision-making often still stalls when teams need to compare measures, prioritize sites, justify budgets, and act across a portfolio. Resilens is built to close that gap. It combines climate risk, vulnerability, and adaptation options in one decision framework and uses AdaptationReturn to compare measures through a standardized, ex-ante ROI. The result is clearer prioritization, stronger internal alignment, and a more practical path from analysis to implementation.
Why isn’t AI alone enough for climate-adaptation decision-making?
Resilens may use AI to improve usability, synthesis, and workflow efficiency, but adaptation decisions should not depend on opaque AI outputs alone. Decisions about public infrastructure, buildings, and resilience investments need transparent assumptions, traceable results, and human oversight. That is why Resilens is designed as a decision-support platform: AI can assist, but the methodology, comparison logic, and final decision process must remain understandable and defensible.
METHOD AND CREDIBILITY
How does Resilens calculate AdaptationReturn?
AdaptationReturn is Resilens’ proprietary decision metric for comparing climate adaptation investments across sites and portfolios. It brings together climate hazard data, site and building characteristics, vulnerability factors, adaptation measure data, and cost assumptions to estimate a standardized, ex-ante 5-year ROI.
In practice, Resilens evaluates how a measure is likely to affect climate risk, what costs it may avoid, what operational or financial benefits it may create, and what wider co-benefits may matter for the decision. The goal is to create a decision-ready basis for comparing options in a consistent and transparent way.
What data sources does Resilens use?
Resilens combines multiple types of data to support adaptation decisions. These typically include climate and hazard data, site and building data, exposure and vulnerability information, adaptation measure data, and relevant cost inputs.
Depending on the use case, this can include information such as local climate conditions, site type, building characteristics, occupancy or user profiles, known weaknesses, and available or potential resilience measures. The aim is to create a structured, decision-useful picture from data that is often fragmented across different systems, documents, and stakeholders.
How does Resilens deal with incomplete local data and uncertainty?
Incomplete data is normal in climate adaptation, especially at portfolio level. Resilens is designed to work with imperfect real-world inputs rather than assuming perfect local data from the start.
Where data is incomplete, Resilens uses the best available information, makes assumptions explicit, and helps users understand the effect of uncertainty on the result. This allows organizations to start with a defensible first assessment, improve data quality over time, and refine decisions as better local information becomes available. The objective is not false precision, but robust prioritization under real-world constraints.
How transparent and auditable are the results?
Resilens is built to support decisions that need to be explained internally and externally. That means results should be understandable, traceable, and usable in real planning and budget processes.
Rather than returning a score without context, Resilens is designed to show the underlying logic of the assessment: what data was used, what assumptions were made, which factors influenced the result, and how options compare. This makes it easier for teams to review findings, challenge assumptions, and communicate the rationale behind prioritization decisions.
Is Resilens a black-box model?
No. Resilens is designed as a decision-support system, not a black-box tool that asks users to accept opaque outputs on trust.
The purpose of the platform is to make complex climate adaptation decisions easier to understand and defend. That requires transparency around inputs, assumptions, and results. While the underlying methodology is structured and rigorous, the outputs are meant to be interpretable by practitioners, managers, and decision-makers who need to use them in the real world.
Workflow and implementation
How long does it take to get started?
Getting started with Resilens does not require a perfect dataset or a long consulting-style setup before any value can be created. In most cases, the first step is setting up your workspace and defining the portfolio or sites to be assessed.
The exact timeline depends on the size of the portfolio, the quality of the available data, and the scope of the assessment. A focused first risk assessment and comparison of adaptation measures can usually be set up fast as many data are already in our database.
What information do we need to provide?
That depends on the required output quality, but typically organizations add site data, basic building information, and any available local context that affects vulnerability or implementation.
Examples may include location data, building characteristics, usage profile, known issues. Resilens is designed to work with the information organizations already have and to identify where additional local data would materially improve decision quality.
What outputs can we export and use in planning, funding, or procurement processes?
Resilens is designed to generate outputs that are useful beyond the platform itself. These can include site-level and portfolio-level assessments, prioritized adaptation options, comparative ROI views, structured decision support for internal planning, and materials that help justify action in funding, budgeting, or procurement contexts.
The focus is on outputs that can support real decisions: which sites to prioritize, which measures to compare, how to explain the rationale, and how to document a credible case for action. In other words, the platform is meant to support workflows, not just analysis.
Commercial trust
How is pricing structured, and do you offer pilots?
Resilens is priced by Managed Sites rather than by seats, and all standard plans include unlimited users. This reflects the value created across physical assets and portfolios, rather than limiting access by team size.
We offer standard plans for different portfolio sizes, as well as custom enterprise setups for larger or more complex needs. Organizations can typically start with a focused demo and a free trial before expanding to a broader rollout across additional sites and portfolios.
Who owns the data and outputs?
Customers retain ownership of the data you provide to Resilens, as well as the customer-specific outputs created for your organization. Resilens retains ownership of the platform, software, models, and underlying methodology.
Where appropriate, we may use aggregated and anonymized data to improve, maintain, and secure the service. This does not give Resilens ownership of your project-specific data, customer-specific outputs, or confidential information.
