Grassroots to Boardrooms: Social Innovation Partnerships for Climate Adaptation

The report advocates for a shift from top-down climate adaptation to collaborative partnerships between businesses and social innovators. It presents a framework for corporate action based on enhancing resilience, capitalizing on opportunities, and shaping collaborative outcomes. Through case studies from India, Bangladesh, and Egypt, it demonstrates how local innovations in migrant worker resilience, water harvesting, and regenerative agriculture can be scaled by private sector resources to achieve transformative systemic change.

• The global climate adaptation market is projected to reach $2 trillion annually by 2030, presenting significant growth opportunities for businesses, particularly in the construction sector where 3 billion people will need climate-resilient housing by 2030.
• Climate adaptation finance remains severely underfunded compared to mitigation; from 2016 to 2020, it averaged only 5% of total privately mobilized climate funding, while annual needs are estimated between $160 billion and $340 billion by 2030.
• The World Economic Forum proposes a three-pillar framework for corporate adaptation action: enhancing resilience to protect operations, capitalizing on new market opportunities for adapted products, and shaping collaborative outcomes through systemic transformations.
• Social innovators provide a critical bridge to 'transformative adaptation'—which shifts values and power dynamics—by scaling incremental and transitional solutions through private sector partnerships.
• In India, the organization Jan Sahas and the Migrants Resilience Collaborative have facilitated social security benefits for over 2.3 million migrant workers, unlocking more than $100 million in government spending to mitigate risks associated with climate-induced migration.
• Build Bangladesh's Prokriti o Paani (PoP) initiative uses zero-energy water towers that harvest moisture from clouds, humidity, and rain, providing a replicable model for water-scarce regions.
• SEKEM in Egypt employs a 'Economy of Love' model combining biodynamic farming with carbon credits to transition 40,000 smallholder farmers to climate-resilient agriculture, having already sequestered 16,603 tonnes of CO2 as of 2022.
• Hindustan Unilever's Prabhat initiative has impacted nearly 9 million lives in India, saving over 130 billion litres of water and achieving a social return on investment of INR 15.46 for every INR 1 invested.
• Private sector investment in adaptation is hindered by several barriers, including short-term ROI expectations, a lack of standardized metrics for evaluating benefits, and perceived high risks associated with untested projects.

APA

World Economic Forum (2023). Grassroots to Boardrooms: Social Innovation Partnerships for Climate Adaptation. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Addressing_Climate_Adaptation_2023.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Grassroots to Boardrooms: Social Innovation Partnerships for Climate Adaptation. 2023. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Addressing_Climate_Adaptation_2023.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Grassroots to Boardrooms: Social Innovation Partnerships for Climate Adaptation |date=November 2023 |url=https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Addressing_Climate_Adaptation_2023.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2023grassroots, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Grassroots to Boardrooms: Social Innovation Partnerships for Climate Adaptation}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2023}, month = nov, url = {https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Addressing_Climate_Adaptation_2023.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }