The Economics of Resilience: how to address combined environmental, economic and political stress?

The Economics of Resilience: how to address combined environmental, economic and political stress?

In a time of geopolitical upheaval, technological disruption and ecological stress, the macroeconomic toolkit built on assumptions about how national economies work is no longer fit for purpose. The dynamics reshaping the global economy - AI's transformation of the workforce and tax base, the transgression of planetary boundaries, the fracturing of globalised trade through nationalist politics - challenge orthodox assumptions about economic cyclicality, labour market flexibility and stable supply-side flows. The models and values underpinning capital allocation, sovereign risk assessment and crisis response seem calibrated for a world that is rapidly receding.

How can a new and adapted economic and environmental toolkit be developed? The risk is that responses to the next financial crisis replicate the errors of the last: bailing out companies reliant on a defunct growth model, liquidating productive assets to service debt, or abandoning long-term clean energy transition in the name of short-term fiscal stability.

Yet a parallel wave of change is underway. Governments, including those in Brussels and Washington, are developing regulation and fiscal frameworks to lock in value for sovereign and regional interests; and some, including Germany, Singapore and Wales are pioneering legal protections to safeguard the rights and resources of future generations. Revisions to the System of National Accounts are embedding measures beyond GDP and climate risk and natural capital are increasingly integrated into sovereign credit ratings and prudential regulation. Can these measures be effective and developed to greater scale? Can they change global market incentives and behaviours?

This Ditchley conference brings together leading economic and climate resilience thinkers, decision-makers from finance ministries, central banks, multilateral institutions and the private investment sector to examine what this recalibration means for investing in resilience and how such approaches could be progressed in readiness for the next economic emergency.