18 March 2025

By Niall Murphy & Simon Zadek


I’ve had a handful of moments over the past few decades when my vantage point on reality was suddenly shifted. Things that can’t be unseen, perceptional one-way doors. The internet, WiFi, a Skype call, or perhaps more profoundly, meeting my wife, finding out we were expecting our first child. The fixtures of reality are immediately recalibrated. The proverbial mosquito flies a little far above the ground and discovers they’re living on an elephant.

The signals of climate driven reality shift are all around us. Twelve months above 1.5C, surging sea levels in Florida and Vietnam, wild fires in Canada and Los Angeles, too much rain in Spain and Malaysia, wobbling crop yields, disappearing glaciers in the Alps, vineyards in Scotland, rising water tables in Massachusetts and London. Once you adopt a vantage point on the world that acknowledges a changed and changing climate, engaging its reality seems incredibly obvious. 

Yet markets seem to continue to operate as if the 1.5C ceiling has not been breached, or the breach is anomalous. Risk and opportunity are mis-priced. Trailing data have never been a good predictor of the future, and markets seem slow to recognise discontinuity even as it happens. As every entrepreneur and investor knows, disruptive inflection is opportunity.

Clearly emission reductions must proceed as fast as possible, the transition to an emissions-free electricity grid needs to accelerate, the electrification of industry and transportation must happen with urgency. But the reality is that we have not and will not keep the world below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. And sadly it seems improbable we’ll keep it below 2.5C. So while we’re on the journey of energy transition and emission curtailment, we must also get good at living in a world impacted by a changed and changing climate. We must adapt, and we must get good at adaptation. This seems obvious from a vantage point beyond 1.5C.

The changing climate will strand assets, destabilise supply chains, challenge the sustainability of regional incumbent industries and ways of working, and introduce new risks to infrastructure and production. But for much of the world changes can and will be navigated with intelligent adaptation planning and investment. Disaster grabs headlines, but adaptation transition is where enormous value creation opportunities are emerging as communities and enterprises invest to transition themselves in response to their changing circumstances. Estimates vary, but averages suggest 10% CAGR revenue growth for adaptation technologies and solutions over the period to 2030 in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. 

As climate impacts accelerate and are better understood, demand seems set to escalate. And with markets continuing to mis-price risk or under-assess adaptation market growth, the opportunity for value growth in adaptation investment is compelling. Whether we’re looking at water scarcity, building resilience, crop yields or nature depletion, innovation will play a critical role in delivering the adaptation needed. Innovation in technologies, but also innovation in system design and policy to expedite market transition.

Adaptation is about building a competence as much as it is about implementing adaptation solutions. Mitigation is a defensive path that attempts to maintain the status quo. Transformative adaptation is about shifting to a fundamentally sustainable position of resilience and capability that aligns with the changed and changing environment. It’s not defensive, and it yields an outcome for a community or an enterprise that supports economic growth, resilience and quality of life. That is what we should aspire to as we navigate our changing world.

We have founded Morphosis to engage and affect this extraordinary transformative adaptation opportunity. Our goal is to deliver returns on transformative adaptation for our investors, the solution providers we invest in, and the communities they serve. We believe that market-based solutions will play a central role, with the capacity to scale and deliver sustainable outcomes in a world where public capital will be increasingly challenged. We are drawing upon decades of hard lessons learned as business operators and policy developers. Morphosis combines execution know-how, policy insight and investment in solutions to catalyse and deliver adaptation at scale.

As soon as one steps into a vantage point that sees the world as beyond 1.5C and fast on a path to beyond 2C, the inevitability of accelerating adaptation adoption becomes the obvious opportunity. We’re compelled both because of the scale of financial value creation to be achieved, and the very real advancement that can be delivered for people and our planet.

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