Climate adaptation is widely recognised as an urgent priority, yet many adaptation projects struggle to attract investment. Unlike renewable energy or other mitigation projects, adaptation initiatives are often small, context-specific, and dispersed across sectors, making them difficult to package into investment portfolios. This challenge has become a major obstacle to scaling resilience investments across Asia.

This project forms part of a larger study examining whether Hong Kong could play a leading role in mobilising adaptation finance through an Adaptation Aggregation Facility (AAF), an institutional mechanism designed to pool smaller adaptation projects into larger, investable portfolios. Preliminary work has already established a literature database, screening protocol, and project-coding framework. The next stage focuses on building a high-quality evidence base of real adaptation investments across Southeast Asia.

Working with publicly available project documents from organisations such as the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, Green Climate Fund, and Adaptation Fund, the student will identify and code adaptation projects according to their sector, scale, governance arrangements, financing structure, and intended beneficiaries. The resulting dataset will help answer a practical policy question: what kinds of adaptation projects are most suitable for aggregation and large-scale investment?

The project offers an opportunity to work on a live research initiative at the intersection of climate change, sustainable finance, development policy, and resilience planning, while developing skills that are increasingly valued in policy, consulting, finance, and sustainability careers.