The Challenge: Infrastructure systems are increasingly exposed to climate hazards that are systemic, interconnected, and disproportionately harmful to vulnerable communities. Floods, heat stress, droughts, and storms do not only damage individual assets; they disrupt entire service networks and generate cascading impacts across transport, energy, water, health, and education systems. These disruptions most severely affect the most vulnerable populations, who depend more heavily on public infrastructure services and have the least capacity to recover from shocks. As a result, infrastructure failure becomes a key channel through which climate change deepens inequality and development vulnerability. 

Approach: GCA’s National Infrastructure Climate Stress-Test workstream provides a systems-based analytical framework to address this challenge by combining climate risk modelling, infrastructure network analysis, and socio-economic impact assessment. The approach moves beyond asset-level climate proofing to assess how climate hazards propagate through interconnected infrastructure systems, generating direct damages, service disruptions, and cascading economic and social impacts. It explicitly considers distributional effects, including differentiated impacts on vulnerable groups, where disruptions to infrastructure services disproportionately affect access to essential services and livelihoods. Based on these diagnostics, GCA supports the development of Adaptation Investment Pathways, which translate system-level risk insights into structured investment strategies, through consultation with Country partners and Governments. These pathways prioritise interventions based on systemic resilience impact, sequence investments across time horizons, and align adaptation actions with national planning frameworks and IFI financing pipelines. The programme is delivered through a blended model combining national stress-tests, rapid assessments, and co-production with governments, universities, and IFIs. This ensures both analytical robustness and institutional ownership, while strengthening domestic technical capacity through applied “learning-by-doing” approaches. Key outputs include National Adaptation Roadmaps, which provide system-wide investment pipelines for infrastructure resilience, and Rapid Stress-Tests, which deliver decision-ready insights to support policy shifts or infrastructure planning. 

Translating Learning into Systems Transformation: Experience across countries demonstrates that climate impacts propagate through interconnected infrastructure networks, generating cascading service disruptions with disproportionate effects on vulnerable populations. This programme provides the analytical and institutional foundation for the emergence of Country Adaptation Windows, as platforms embedded in national planning and budgeting systems that integrate climate risk analysis into investment decision-making across sectors. In doing so, they reposition climate resilience as a core determinant of equity, efficiency, and development impact in public and private investment choices.