Editor’s choice
Editor’s choice
Across Asia, the communities on the front line of climate change are often the furthest from the finance they need to adapt to it. A new report on Asian philanthropy, launched at this year’s Philanthropy Asia Summit in Singapore, points to one group quietly helping to close that gap: a small set of funders willing to take on risks that governments and commercial investors will not. For SEI’s climate finance work in the region, their approach offers some useful lessons.
The needs are stark. Communities across the region are contending with rising seas, sinking deltas, erratic monsoons that swing between flood and drought, and the steady loss of fragile livelihoods – yet the funding to build their resilience lags far behind.
UNEP’s 2025 Adaptation Gap Report: Running on Empty warned of a “yawning gap in adaptation finance” for developing countries – one putting lives, livelihoods and entire economies at risk. It put the cost of adaptation in developing countries by 2035 at over USD 310 billion a year, around 12 times current international public adaptation finance.
As donor governments tighten aid budgets – squeezed further by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – climate finance has become harder to secure than ever. Private capital is an increasingly vital source, but investors need bankable opportunities, and many adaptation measures, by their nature of helping people in need, are not designed to deliver direct or immediate returns. The most urgent challenges, from drought-resilient agriculture to early-warning systems for heatwaves, often call for innovation – yet funding for experimental, early-stage work tends to fall outside the reach of mainstream aid, commercial investment and conventional philanthropy alike.
The report, Philanthropy as Risk Capital in Asia, examines how a small but influential group of Asian philanthropists is helping to fill these gaps. Commissioned by the Philanthropy Asia Alliance and researched by the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society (CAPS), it was launched at the sixth Philanthropy Asia Summit in Singapore on 18 May 2026.
The report calls their approach “conviction-led capital”: flexible funding that absorbs the financial, reputational and failure risks of untested solutions. Asian philanthropists and families, it notes, often hold strong personal convictions about the causes they back, control the capital directly, and take an active hand in shaping the organisations they support. Many are also moving beyond traditional grants towards concessional debt and equity – not as separate strategies, but as connected stages of support over time.
Such capital is still relatively rare in Asia, but the report argues it can drive outsized impact: the initiatives it documents have together reached more than 210 million people across the region. It profiles a dozen funders already backing unproven ideas – among them Temasek Trust’s Catalytic Capital for Climate and Health (C3H), which co-led a Series A round for Equatic, a start-up developing seawater electrolysis for carbon removal.
SEI is already putting these ideas to work through ICCAP – Inclusive Climate Finance for Vulnerable Communities in the Asia-Pacific – a five-year program designed to bridge the gap between innovative finance and on-the-ground adaptation. Delivered by a consortium that includes SEI and funded by Germany’s International Climate Initiative (IKI), it works across six highly climate-vulnerable countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Fiji, Lao PDR and Nepal.
The programme channels national and international, public and private adaptation finance to vulnerable communities and marginalized groups through locally led solutions. It strengthens private-sector engagement and works to ensure that green financial products meet the needs of rural smallholders, women, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, and those who are economically and socially excluded.
Its core innovation is the Regional Adaptation Investment Facility (RAIF), a regional platform to channel public and private capital for adaptation through financial service providers (FSPs). RAIF will back instruments such as blended finance, hedging and green bonds, with a design flexible enough to adapt to local markets and scale long-term resilience investments. ICCAP is also running six multistakeholder action labs (MALs), bringing together climate-vulnerable communities, private-sector actors, policymakers and technical experts to co-create locally relevant, needs-responsive and bankable adaptation solutions.
For SEI’s work on climate finance and adaptation, including ICCAP, the report offers a number of practical and strategic insights to build on.
Many adaptation solutions take years to prove themselves. Restoring mangroves, introducing climate-resilient crops or rolling out decentralized water treatment all need sustained backing well beyond the typical three-to-five-year grant cycle. The report found that individual philanthropists and family foundations in Asia often commit for a decade or more: the Tahija Foundation, for instance, invested over USD 17 million across ten years to test and scale the Wolbachia method for dengue control in Indonesia – a health adaptation to climate-driven disease. SEI can do more to identify and engage these patient funders, and to show them where their capital will have the most durable impact.
Risk capital is most powerful at the inception and pilot stages, paying for the prototyping, community engagement and evidence-building that neither governments nor commercial investors will touch. Once a solution is proven, the public sector often steps in: Wateroam’s portable filtration systems, seeded by grants from the DBS Foundation and Temasek, are now used by disaster-relief agencies across Asia. SEI’s work on adaptation pathways and policy integration can help design pilot-to-scale roadmaps from the outset, and co-developing evidence frameworks with philanthropists can improve the odds that successful pilots are mainstreamed into public systems.
The report documents growing use of concessional debt, recoverable grants and even equity by philanthropic funders. Seven Clean Seas, an ocean-plastic recovery enterprise, received both a grant and a later equity investment from the ECCA Family Foundation, while Agros, a sustainable-farming social enterprise, used a social loan from Leap201 to bridge a cash-flow gap before securing Series A funding. Because the capital can be recycled, these instruments ease the need for perpetual grants – something SEI’s climate finance research could explore further, especially for nature-based adaptation and community-led resilience.
They mitigate risk not only through financial structures but through the government access, community trust and local legitimacy they bring: the Vanke Foundation connected INSPRO to district-government partners in China, and Tata Trusts introduced Haqdarshak to its network of rural digital-literacy workers. Many also reframe inaction as the greater risk – as Carol Liew, managing director of the ECCA Family Foundation, has put it, the real question is the risk of inaction rather than the risk of acting. For SEI’s adaptation work, where local context is everything, our convening power and trusted relationships with governments, policymakers and communities are themselves a form of risk mitigation. With a long record as an honest broker, SEI can help philanthropists navigate regulatory landscapes and connect with credible local implementers.
Working alongside this new generation of conviction-led funders gives SEI more ways to finance the bold, innovative climate solutions the region needs.
Project / This project promotes an inclusive climate finance ecosystem for climate adaptation and mitigation in the Asia-Pacific region.
SEI report / How do adaptation policies and governance acknowledge and respond to the systemic nature of climate change?
Perspective / This perspective argues for a systemic approach by integrating mitigation and adaptation by default into every policy, budget and planning decision.
SEI report / This report explores the barriers that hinder finance flows for climate adaptation in four Asian countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal and Thailand.
