Event Recap | FAST-Infra at London Climate Action Week 2026

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The timing was not lost on anyone in the room. Much of today’s infrastructure was designed for a climate that no longer exists, and that gap is precisely what the FAST-Infra Label was created to close: a shared, credible standard for what resilient, investable infrastructure looks like.

Across an opening keynote, two panel discussions, a rich questions-and-answers session, and closing reflections, participants explored the financial case for resilience, the barriers slowing market adoption, and the practical changes needed to move from ambition to implementation.

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Resilience Is a Driver of Returns, Not Just a Cost

The event's central question received a fairly consistent answer all day. The opening keynote directly challenged the idea that resilience is a defensive cost to be absorbed. Citing research from Ortec Finance and Global Infrastructure Basel, speakers highlighted evidence that resilient, sustainable infrastructure delivers stronger long-term, risk-adjusted returns with lower downside volatility, and better performance under climate stress scenarios. 

The market case, in other words, is no longer in dispute. What the room spent most of its time on was why capital still is not moving fast enough to match that case, and discussing what needs to change to fix that.

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Why Isn't Capital Moving Faster?

Two barriers came up repeatedly, across nearly every panel:

• Absence of shared language: An insurer, a developer, an asset manager, and a project finance lender each think about "resilience" differently, and that misalignment creates friction that slows deals down. Standards and labels were repeatedly framed as earning their value less as a checklist and more as a translation layer, giving different parts of the capital stack a common reference point.
• A lack of legal enforceability: The opening keynote argued that positive commitments only hold when they are hardwired into the legal architecture of a deal: concession and PPP agreements, shareholder agreements, credit agreements as conditions precedent, and EPC and O&M contracts, backed by real KPIs, milestone-linked payments, and remedies for non-compliance. Without that, sustainability commitments remain aspirational rather than binding.

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Five Practical Takeaways from the Discussion

1. ‍Resilience is cheaper and more effective, the earlier it is built in. This was the single most consistent theme across the day. A report co-authored with the World Bank Global Infrastructure Facility, Underwriting the Future of Resilience, found that only 16% of insurers are currently engaged at a project's feasibility stage, and just 24% at the design stage, meaning most insurers are pricing risk decisions they had no hand in shaping. 
   
   The recommended approach was straightforward: assess, map, and embed. Assess current and forward-looking climate risk early, map specific resilience measures against that risk, and embed them into siting, design, and construction rather than bolting them on later.‍
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2. "Avoided loss" is not a compelling pitch, but value creation is. One of the sharper reframes of the day: telling an investment committee that a resilience measure prevents a loss that hasn't happened yet is a weak argument, because it shows up as nothing on a balance sheet. The stronger case is demonstrating what the investment protects or unlocks. 
   
   One example presented was a portfolio solar project that adapted its existing panel-tracking system to tilt away from hail events, reducing impact by 30 to 40% per event, at a lower cost than a protective coating, while improving its insurance terms in the process, turning a risk mitigation measure into a straightforward return-on-investment case.‍
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3. Revenue continuity matters as much as asset survival. Multiple speakers described a shift in how asset managers talk about resilience internally, from "will this asset withstand a shock" to "will the service and revenue it provides continue uninterrupted." That distinction matters because it connects resilience directly to the numbers an investment committee already cares about, rather than treating it as a separate sustainability consideration.‍
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4. Resilience does not stop at an asset's boundary. A recurring example across the day involved infrastructure that is resilient in isolation but still exposed through its surroundings, such as an EV charging station that survives a flood but sees no revenue because the roads leading to it are impassable. 
   
   This pushed the conversation toward cross-stakeholder collaboration as a practical necessity, not an aspiration: asset owners coordinating with adjacent infrastructure operators, municipalities, and insurers rather than solving resilience asset by asset.
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5. Safety is a part of financial performance. One discussion broadened the room's definition of resilience considerably. One road safety professional in attendance pointed out that: 
   
   Road deaths total roughly 1.19 million annually, disproportionately affecting people aged 15 to 29, yet only around 1% of global transport infrastructure investment is dedicated specifically to road safety, despite an estimated eightfold return on every dollar spent. 

Other practical examples helped form a strong connection with this topic. Such as a metro network in Tianjin that saw ridership increase 85% after safety-focused redesigns, including better lighting, cycle lanes, and slower speed zones, and a bus rapid transit project in Dakar saw a 7% ridership increase translate into a 55% revenue increase after similar interventions. 

The takeaway from this data was that unsafe assets carry higher disruption and higher insurance costs, which makes safety a direct input into financial performance rather than a distinct workstream.

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The Insurance Sector's Role: Early Warning Signal and Catalyst

Insurance came up as its own thread throughout the day. Insurers were described as an early warning signal already repricing and, in some cases, withdrawing cover from climate-exposed assets. But the discussion dedicated to insurance argued insurers also have the potential to accelerate investment. If underwriting and reinsurance markets adopt globally comparable frameworks to differentiate resilient from non-resilient assets, that creates a pricing signal capable of moving capital at scale.

One speaker pointed out that recent catastrophe losses show a persistent annual gap of roughly $100 billion between economic losses and insured losses. A survey of 25 global insurers also found that when climate risk management information is missing from a project, 40% of insurers apply more conservative terms, including higher deductibles and narrower coverage. In many cases, those costs could be reduced simply by sharing better information earlier in project development. 

Several participants also argued that insurers and brokers should be viewed less as transactional partners and more as strategic advisors throughout the project lifecycle. Treating them as interchangeable is part of why resilience conversations sometimes stall.

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Closing Reflections

The day concluded with a reminder that financial systems and physical systems are becoming increasingly inseparable. Investment horizons must begin to reflect the much longer timescales over which climate risk unfolds, and resilience creates value. 

Viewed through that lens, insurance is no longer simply a mechanism for transferring risk, but rather an increasingly useful indicator of long-term asset quality and investment resilience.

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FAST-Infra thanks Pinsent Masons for co-hosting, and all speakers, panellists, and attendees for a genuinely cross-sector conversation, at a moment that made the stakes impossible to ignore.