Over the past decade, the fields of climate adaptation and climate resilience have gained increasing attention as communities around the world confront the growing impacts of climate change. Because the climate crises touch all aspects of our lives—with effects across society and the economy—adaptation and resilience can be difficult to define and differentiate. Halcyon’s Senior Manager for Sourcing, Selections, & Alumni dives into what the terms mean and how they relate to our programs.

What is climate adaptation & climate resilience?

Building on leading industry perspectives and insights from the experts we work with day-to-day at Halcyon, we’ve created our own operational definitions of the two fields in the context of supporting impact-driven entrepreneurs developing solutions for vulnerable communities across the globe:

• Halcyon’s climate adaptation focus: actions taken to minimize, compensate for, and prevent harm from climate shocks.
• Halcyon’s climate resilience focus: the systems and infrastructure that prepares for and responds to climate shocks.

In simplest terms, adaptation can be seen as actions and processes taken in response or preparation to the adverse impacts of climate change—whether it’s to minimize or compensate for harm, or otherwise adjust to any actual and expected effects. Climate resilience might be viewed as the broader capacity of a system to prepare for, withstand, and rebound from intersecting climate-related shocks or stressors.

Halcyon supports scalable ventures that strengthen climate adaptation and resilience, particularly for underserved communities. Additionally, Halcyon is looking for proximate founders, defined as the extent to which a founder or team has direct or lived experience with the issue they are working to solve, whether through personal background, community ties, professional experience, or expertise gained through other means.

Specifically, we’re looking at climate adaptation and resilience solutions in sectors including, but not limited to:

• Climate-resilient infrastructure and built environment
• Disaster preparedness and emergency response
• Adaptation finance and data intelligence
• Climate insurance and risk transfer
• Agriculture and food security
• Community and social resilience
• Water resilience and water tech
• Nature-based and ecosystem resilience solutions
• Blue economy and coastal protection
• Energy and grid resilience
• Health and climate resilience

At Halcyon, climate mitigation solutions are currently outside the scope of our eligibility criteria, except in cases where a solution that focuses on adaptation or resilience also delivers secondary mitigation benefits. This ensures cohesion among the cohort, opportunities for collaboration, and more focused and relevant programming.

Why does Halcyon focus on climate adaptation & resilience?

Climate change isn’t happening in the future—we’re experiencing its impacts today, necessitating a greater emphasis on how we adapt and build resilience now. Furthermore, the most vulnerable communities are typically the most heavily affected by the negative impacts of climate change. For example, when Hurricane Melissa swept through Jamaica in 2025—among the most powerful Atlantic storms on record—it left infrastructure broken, crops destroyed, and essential services such as health and education interrupted, disrupting the lives of over 700,000 children and other communities most in need of protection.

As the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters continues to increase, we will see an even greater need for integrating climate resilient infrastructure, preparing vulnerable populations, and supporting ecosystems post-disaster. A few figures speak to the astounding need for this work: 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, with the majority residing in the Global South, and extreme weather events have caused direct economic losses of nearly $4.5 trillion from 1995 to 2024. Solutions that focus solely on climate mitigation, or “actions to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions from human activities,”—while an important part of overall climate change work—cannot address these current realities alone.

Despite these pressing concerns, currently less than 10% of all climate financing goes towards climate adaptation solutions, with funds heavily skewed towards targeting emission reductions. Because Halcyon’s work focuses on bridging the resource gap for impact-driven founders and their ventures, it is a natural step to focus our climate programming on adaptation and resilience solutions.

Halcyon ventures in climate adaptation & resilience

Climate Adaptation Ventures:

Suyana Climate Insurance

• Solution: Suyana provides accurate, accessible, and affordable climate insurance tech powered by satellite data. Their main products are early warning systems and parametric drought insurance for farmers in Latin America facing a desperate need for protection against climate-driven droughts and floods, where previous coverage was either unaffordable or unavailable.

ADAPTA

• Solution: ADAPTA equips financial institutions with cutting-edge, AI-enabled risk management software, transforming how they assess and manage agricultural risk while also supporting farmers in reducing their vulnerability to climate shocks. Their main product, the ADAPTA Climate Score, leverages biodiversity, climate, soil, and water data and is analogous to a credit score, using past data to forecast future risk.

Climate Resilience Ventures:

3BA Allamanda Enterprise Limited

• Solution: 3BA Allamanda develops affordable, long-life sand battery systems that provide reliable electricity to underserved and off-grid communities in the Caribbean, creating sustainable systems and energy resilience.

Radava Mercantile

• Solution: Radava is an Agri-FinTech venture addressing agricultural market failures that threaten food security by ensuring smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa have equal access to global markets, financial opportunities, and sustainable livelihoods through an agricultural commodity exchange market, alternative financing, and post-harvest technologies.

As global climate challenges continue to outpace traditional institutions, alternative solutions continue to emerge from bold, impact-driven founders who are proximate to the very problems they’re solving—but who often don’t receive the support they need to succeed. Halcyon’s unique programing model elevates the sustainable growth of climate founders and their ventures through direct services, targeted business training, and ecosystem connections, preparing them to contribute to meaningful global change.

Since our founding in 2014, we’ve accelerated over 180 impact-driven climate innovators. Since 2023, we’ve honed in our focus, offering multiple climate-specific programs each year in Africa, in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and in the US (a cohort that draws on a pool of global founders). Building on this momentum, we’ve added two new climate programs for 2026: one in Mexico and one Pre-Accelerator in the Caribbean. Over time, we’ve listened and learned alongside our founders to understand the biggest needs in the climate innovation space, and where our acceleration can have the most impact.

If you’re a founder building a venture in climate adaptation or resilience and are looking for a supportive global community of founders, connections to impact investors, a holistic analysis of your venture, and expert masterclasses to grow sustainably, we invite you to apply through our year-round rolling application.

To learn more about our program eligibility and apply, click here.