Earth Security is the strategy partner of the BMW Foundation's upcoming 3rd Global Table in Santa Cruz Cabrália Brazil (26th-29th March). The meeting brings companies, investors, senior government officials and civil society from Europe, Brazil and other emerging economies to focus on partnerships to improve the resilience of infrastructure to climate change.

As the strategic partner of this program, Earth Security brings industry and sector-specific intelligence on resource risks, business networks and partnership blueprints across key emerging economies, from Brazil to India. The 25 participants include representatives from Cargill, Brazilian Business Leaders Group (LIDE), Tata Cleantech Capital Ltd, the Presidency of Brazil and the European Investment Bank, among many others.

Alejandro Litovsky, CEO of Earth Security and author of the 2015 Earth Security Index, provides a starting point for discussions on the process of urbanization and resource security in this short article: "The Challenge of Building Resilience to Climate Change" (reproduced in full below).

"We have defined three areas of investment opportunity where we are inviting participants to consider how European and emerging market players can join forces to accelerate resilience in infrastructure investments.”

Alejandro Litovsky, CEO of Earth Security

In 2011, unprecedented mudslides in Rio de Janeiro caused the death of over 900 people and a total of US$4.7 billion in damages. The crisis sparked concern over the preparedness of the country in the face of accelerating weather-related risks. Similar challenges are faced by rapidly growing cities in most emerging economies.

The 2015 Earth Security Index, which we launched in London last February, anticipates a more complex set of sustainability pressures affecting emerging market growth. Pressures on available land, the security of water, food, and energy supplies, the demographic growth of urban dwellers, and fiscal constraints are likely to combine in complex ways to spark political and economic risks with global ramifications. The analysis of the combined pressures felt across nine of the most important emerging economies (BRICS and MINT) shows that exposure to extreme weather events is likely to be a defining feature of emerging-market growth and amplify other sustainability pressures. Building the resilience of key investment sectors in emerging markets will require more sustainable business models and investments.

Today, three years after Brazil's traumatic experience, the country is enduring the worst drought in its history. With water reservoirs at record lows, a crippled hydropower capacity (which accounts for almost 80% of Brazil's electricity generation capacity) has prompted rationing, power cuts and protests. In October 2014, Sao Paulo had less than 2 weeks of drinking water reserves.

In the aftermath of the 2011 disaster, in early June 2012, the Earth Security undertook with the Rede de Desenvolvimento Humano (REDEH) in Rio de Janeiro the task to develop new working models of collaboration between companies, financial institutions, local governments and communities to boost resilience to these disasters. We convened 40 people across these sectors in the mountains outside Rio, in Vista Alegre, a beautiful place in the heart of the Atlantic rainforest, and visited the towns hit by landslides, guided by officials of the Civil Defense of Rio de Janeiro. According to one of the participants, Bernadete Castilho from the Brazilian energy company Petrobras, prior to the disaster, Rio de Janeiro’s citizens had “lost awareness of their relationship with the environment in which they live, which in 2011 translated into a failure to associate unusual rainfall with potential floods and mudslides."

As a result of the process, we envisioned a partnership between Rio’s Civil Defense Agency, Petrobras (the energy company has industrial installations in the area and therefore an interest in improving resilience), and REDEH to improve the mapping of disaster risk management initiatives from civil society, private and public sectors in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro in order to fill the gap of risk information and community engagement. Because the deforestation of Rio's hillsides had acted as a powerful amplifier of the landslides, we also developed the concept for insurance companies to consider the conservation of urban forest belts as an essential risk mitigation mechanism and as a critical ‘natural infrastructure' ensuring the stability of water provision and energy to the surrounding cities. Some of these ideas were only possible because we had brought together a group of people that collectively could create a greater intelligence on how to address these complex challenges through business innovation.

At the end of this month, we are helping the BMW Foundation to organize the 3rd BMW Foundation Global Table on resource security. The meeting will be held in Brazil on the topic of climate change and the resilience of cities. Some of the same ingredients – trans-sectorial dialogue, diversity, and common purpose – will this time be applied to an urgent global challenge: how to enable a greater convergence of interests between Europe and emerging economies to deal with the challenge of building resilience to climate change.

Urban areas in rapidly emerging economies will account for two-thirds of worldwide infrastructure spending over the next two decades. The exposure of this growth to more extreme weather events will have catastrophic effects for humanity.

New infrastructure investments that build resilience are critically needed. The third phase of Brazil’s strategic growth acceleration program (2015–2018) offers an opportunity to link the issue of sustainable infrastructure to an area of top priority for the government, Brazilian companies and large investment funds. The first two phases of this program reached R$1.59 trillion in investment into the logistics and energy sectors.

For the Global Table in March, we have defined three areas of opportunity where we are inviting participants to consider how European and emerging market players can join forces to accelerate resilience infrastructure investments. One is the energy transition towards distributed renewables like solar and wind power; the second is the revitalisation of urban transport along sustainable criteria, and the third is infrastructure investment for cities. In all these three areas, we believe that by pooling the interests, technologies, knowledge, political will and investment capital from Europe and emerging economies, it is possible to accelerate the global convergence on more sustainable cities.

However, while investments into physical (and natural) infrastructures are critical to preparing our societies for a period of greater turbulence, there is a great urgency to promote new 'governance infrastructures', the processes and spaces for dialogue and convergence that can enable the cross-sector collaboration on which our success ultimately depends.