Climate resilience consulting is a growing field, but most of the conversation stays abstract — frameworks, strategy decks, vulnerability assessments that sit in a PDF. Here's what it actually looks like when you're building a climate resilience index for a national government, with real indicators, real scoring methodology, and real stakeholders who need to make investment decisions with limited budgets.
We recently completed a climate resilience platform for the Cayman Islands Government, funded by the EU Green Overseas Programme through Expertise France and built in partnership with IRMA (International Resilience Management Agency). This is the project behind the methodology — and the lessons that don't show up in the typical consulting engagement summary.
Why governments need purpose-built climate resilience tools
Small Island Developing States face disproportionate climate risk. Over the past 50 years, SIDS have absorbed $153 billion in climate-related losses — roughly 2.1% of GDP annually. There are 39 SIDS countries, most of them making critical decisions about climate resilient infrastructure investments with severely constrained budgets. Every dollar misallocated is a dollar that doesn't go toward the project that would have had the highest impact.
The problem isn't a lack of data. It's a lack of decision-support tools built for how governments actually work.
Existing climate risk platforms fall into two categories, and neither fits. Enterprise financial risk tools like Jupiter Intelligence and Climate X are built for banks and insurers — they model asset-level exposure and cost six figures annually. Government data viewers like CMRA and CREAT are informational, showing maps and projections, but they don't help you score infrastructure investments or track whether your national resilience strategy is actually working.
The gap: no affordable, purpose-built climate resilience solutions designed for government infrastructure investment scoring and tracking — the kind of climate resilience master plan tool that turns strategy into operational decisions. That's what we set out to build.
What we built: a climate resilience index for national infrastructure
The platform is a decision-support system with two separate scoring dimensions, each answering a different question.
The first is a Resilience Score— how is the country's environment actually doing? This is built on 28+ national-level indicators organized across six focus areas. Real examples from the system: GHG emissions (target: reduce from 51,000 to 13,500 tCO2e), renewable energy percentage (from 4% to 30%), Category 5 certified buildings (from 30% to 80%), emergency response time (from 9.2 to 5 minutes), climate finance tracked in CI$, and schools with climate curriculum (from 10% to 80%).
The second is a Project Score— how are specific government infrastructure projects performing? This uses 16+ project-level indicators covering budget execution, beneficiaries reached, compliance status, and delivery milestones. Decision-makers can see which capital projects are on track and which are falling behind, connected to the national resilience indicators they're supposed to be improving.
The scoring methodology
Every indicator has a baseline value and a target value. The score is how far along you are on a 0–100 scale. We designed three indicator types to handle different kinds of progress: Improve indicators for metrics that need to get better (most of them), Maintain indicators for metrics where holding steady is the goal, and Milestoneindicators for policy items that move through stages — not started, in development, adopted, implementing, fully operational.
Data quality weighting was critical. Government data is uneven — some ministries have excellent measurement systems, others are working from estimates. Rather than treating all data equally, the climate resilience index weights each indicator by data quality grade: Grade A data gets 100% influence, Grade D gets 50%, Grade E gets 30%. This means the score reflects confidence levels, not just raw numbers. Better data has more pull on the overall score.
The six focus areas are averaged into an overall resilience score, with adjustable weights so the government can reflect policy priorities. If coral reef health is a higher priority than renewable energy this funding cycle, the weights can shift accordingly.
The entire climate resilience framework was designed to be repeatable. This isn't a one-off tool — it's a model that other Small Island Developing States can adopt with their own indicators and targets. The architecture was modeled after the Allovance/IRAC system used in Dominica for post-hurricane recovery, but purpose-built and affordable for countries that don't have World Bank-scale budgets.
Why this isn't a typical web development project
If you've only built SaaS products or marketing sites, climate resilience consulting for government clients is a different discipline entirely.
- •Multi-stakeholder complexity. Government ministries, international agencies (IRMA, Expertise France), and EU funders all have requirements. You're not building for one product owner — you're navigating institutional dynamics where each stakeholder has different priorities, reporting requirements, and approval processes.
- •On-site collaboration is non-negotiable. We flew to the Cayman Islands to work directly with officials from multiple ministries. Climate resilience planning at this level requires understanding workflows that don't show up in a Zoom call — how data actually moves between departments, who has authority to update indicators, what reporting cadences the government runs on.
- •Data residency requirements. Government data can't be hosted on US servers. We used Supabase with EU-region PostgreSQL hosting to meet non-US data residency requirements. This sounds straightforward, but it constrains your entire infrastructure stack — CDN configuration, edge functions, backup locations.
- •The deliverable isn't a launch — it's adoption. A climate resilience tool that government officials don't use is just expensive shelf-ware. We built for two user roles: Data Entry staff who update indicators via manual entry and CSV import, and Decision Makers who consume dashboards and scoring summaries. The interface had to work for non-technical users who weren't going to read documentation.
- •You're building a decision-making tool, not a website. The entire stack (Next.js, React, TypeScript, Supabase) was chosen for maintainability and handover — the platform needs to outlast the consulting engagement and be maintained by local teams or future partners.
The climate resilience consulting market
The resilience scorecard market is growing from $1.2 billion to $4.3 billion by 2033. The broader climate risk assessment market is projected to reach $31.2 billion by 2030. These numbers are real, but they obscure an important detail: most of that spend is concentrated in financial services. Banks and insurers buying enterprise climate risk platforms from established vendors.
Climate resilience planning for SIDS and municipalities is massively underserved. These governments need climate resilience tools just as much as JPMorgan does — arguably more, since their entire economies are at stake — but they can't afford $200K/year SaaS contracts. The funding exists (EU, World Bank, GFDRR, UNDP actively fund these projects), but the supply of firms that can actually build the software is thin.
Most climate consulting firms produce reports and strategies. Fewer can build the custom platforms that turn those strategies into operational systems. That gap between “we wrote a climate resilience framework” and “we built the tool that scores your infrastructure investments against it” is where the real value is.
What to look for in a climate resilience consulting partner
If you're a government agency, donor organization, or international development partner evaluating firms for a climate resilience platform, here's what matters:
- •Can they build software, not just write reports? A PDF with recommendations is not the same as a working climate resilience platform with scoring logic, dashboards, and data entry workflows. Ask to see live applications they've built, not just slide decks.
- •Do they understand government procurement and multi-stakeholder environments? International development projects have reporting requirements, approval chains, and institutional dynamics that commercial SaaS projects don't. Experience matters here — you can't improvise your way through a project with three funding agencies and five government ministries.
- •Have they worked with international development agencies? EU, World Bank, UNDP-funded projects have specific compliance, reporting, and documentation requirements. A firm that has navigated these before will move faster and avoid the mistakes that delay delivery.
- •Can they design for non-technical users? Government officials are not software engineers. The climate resilience tool needs to make sense to a permanent secretary, not just a developer. This means investing in UX research, user testing, and iterative design — not just building features and hoping people figure them out.
- •Is the platform designed to be handed over? Sustainability in international development means local ownership. The technology stack, documentation, and architecture should allow the platform to be maintained by local teams or future partners without ongoing dependence on the original builder.
Working on climate resilience?
Whether you're a government agency, donor organization, or international development partner — we build climate resilience platforms that turn data into infrastructure investment decisions.