IFC Guidance on Climate Resilience
Guidance for the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group, on building climate resilience into mining and processing plant investment. Built decisions-backward rather than hazard-scores-forward, publishing July 2026.
The challenge
Mining and processing plants are long-lived, capital-intensive assets sited in places where physical climate hazards are intensifying: heat, water stress, flooding, storms. Investors and lenders needed a defensible way to factor climate resilience into how these assets are planned, financed, and operated.
The sector’s conventional approach assessed climate risk hazard-forward: score the hazards, colour the map, rank the sites, file the report. What that produces is a list of things that might go wrong. What it doesn’t produce is an answer to the question an investor actually asks: what should we do differently, and what is that worth? The assessment ends exactly where the decision-making begins.
The inversion
The guidance I lead for the IFC turns the assessment around. Instead of starting from hazard scores and working forwards, it starts from the decisions an investor or operator has to make (design specifications, capital allocation, water strategy, operating thresholds) and works backwards to the climate analysis those decisions need. Resilience is defined first, as a performance requirement for the asset; the hazard work then exists to serve it. Social value and non-financial outcomes sit at the heart of the investment case, not in an appendix.
That inversion sounds small. In practice it changes what gets measured, what counts as material, and who the assessment is for. Materiality stops being “which hazard scores highest” and becomes “which failures would interrupt production, breach a covenant, or strand the capital”: questions a lender’s technical adviser and a plant engineer can both work with.
What I did
As development lead, I convened industry, lenders, and non-profits into technical working groups and got them to agree one peer-reviewed approach: the difference between a methodology and the methodology. The guidance provides technical and non-technical tools for two audiences at once: mining companies building the case for investment in resilience, and lenders evaluating those opportunities. It publishes in July 2026.
Why it matters
Guidance written for the IFC has to survive scrutiny from every side at once: the operator’s engineers, the lender’s advisers, the auditor, the regulator. That is the level of rigour a methodology needs before anyone should trust it. It is the same decision-first logic that now underpins how I design assessment workflows for consultancies, and Threshold, my decision-first physical climate risk platform. The thinking was built here first.
I lead this work in my role at ERM, in partnership with Jupiter Intelligence. It is presented here as personal track record, not a Fieldhouse engagement.