Heat and water stress are already affecting health, productivity, livelihoods and infrastructure across Asia. Yet their economic costs are not always visible in the metrics that shape investment decisions.
This creates a practical challenge for scaling planetary resilience: making risks measurable for capital to respond, while building the financing structures needed to scale promising solutions.
At ReThink HK 2026, a two-day conference focused on climate action and sustainable development held in September, Ryan Tan, Head of Temasek Trust’s Planet Collaborative and Catalytic Capital for Climate and Health (C3H), moderated a panel examining how heat and water risks can be better priced, and what it takes to scale promising solutions for wider adoption.
He was joined by Prof Cai Wenjia of Tsinghua University, Patrick Ho of Swire Properties, Nimesh Modak of Imagine H2O Asia, and Vivek Raman of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Making the Cost of Heat Stress Visible
Heat can carry significant economic costs that are difficult to capture through conventional financial measures. Better measurement can help close that gap — connecting physical climate impacts with their economic consequences, strengthening the case for resilience investment before those risks become more costly to manage.
The scale of the challenge is significant: Lancet Countdown China report estimates that China lost 40 billion working hours to heat in 2024, equivalent to 20 million full-time workers and 20% more than the year before. Metrics such as avoided healthcare costs can help make the benefits of heat resilience easier to price into investment decisions.
How risk is measured on ground matters too.
At Taikoo Place in Hong Kong, wet bulb globe temperature sensors piloted by Swire Properties captured a more localised picture of heat exposure, including the effects of solar radiation faced by people working in direct sunlight.
The pilot has enabled real-time alerts to reach cleaners and outdoor workers through smart watches, illustrating how more localised information can support more targeted responses to heat exposure.
But making risk visible is only one part of the equation. Even where solutions already exist and have performed successfully in pilots, moving them into wider adoption can be difficult.
From Proof-of-Concept to Commercial Deployment
Water technology receives just 2% of climate venture funding, while venture capital's share of the broader climate capital stack has fallen from 20% in 2021 to 8% today. The challenge is not only to mobilise more capital, but to deploy it strategically to bridge the commercialisation gap.
The discussion also pointed to the “missing middle” — the distance between ambition and projects that are ready for investment. Closing it requires stronger project preparation, a clearer understanding of risk and financing structures that reflect each project’s constraints, and trusted collaboration across partners.
Catalytic Capital that Helps Unlock the Next Step
Catalytic capital plays a critical role in turning promising solutions into investable opportunities. By taking on early-stage risk, enabling real-world deployment and building evidence of what works, it helps close the gaps that often stand between a pilot and meaningful scale, creating a pathway for commercial capital to follow.
This is central to Temasek Trust’s approach to scaling impact: bringing together capital, capabilities and partnerships to move solutions from innovation to adoption. Through C3H, our catalytic vehicle, this means helping promising climate and health innovations like injewelme, Neocrete, and Certain Energy to overcome early-stage barriers and move towards broader market adoption.
As heat and water risks translate into growing economic and social costs, the challenge is not simply finding solutions, but creating the conditions for capital to reach them. Stronger evidence, thoughtful risk-sharing and trusted collaboration across public, private and philanthropic actors can help build those pathways.
Ultimately, strengthening planetary resilience will require more than capital alone. It will require the right capital, at the right stage, alongside the partnerships and evidence needed to turn solutions into lasting systems of resilience.
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