New VBA paper and model: A practical resilience lens for hard-to-abate industries
The Value Balancing Alliance (VBA) and Deloitte are pleased to share a new paper and model on Risk-Based Resilience Indicators (RI) for hard-to-abate industries.
As transition pressures intensify and physical climate risks become more visible across industrial value chains, investors, banks, insurers, and corporates need tools that go beyond broad ESG aggregation. They need signals that are decision-useful, financially relevant, and grounded in real risk drivers.
This new paper introduces a risk-based approach to resilience designed specifically for sectors such as cement, metals and mining, chemicals, and long-distance transport. These sectors are central to the real economy, but they are also highly exposed to policy shifts, technology constraints, infrastructure bottlenecks, operational disruption, and changing financing conditions.
The paper sets out a practical framework for assessing resilience through two core lenses:
Rather than treating resilience as a broad narrative concept, the paper links it to cash-flow stability, downside risk, credit relevance, and long-term strategic positioning. This makes the proposed RI framework especially relevant for real-world applications such as:
Importantly, this work is not positioned as an abstract scoring exercise. It is a step toward a more transparent, auditable, and finance-relevant resilience signal that can be tested, refined, and applied in practice.
The paper also points ahead to RI 2.0: a future development pathway that could incorporate asset-level and geospatial data overlays, helping strengthen resilience analysis with more granular insights on hazard exposure, site conditions, and supply-chain dependencies.
At VBA, we see this work as part of a broader effort to advance decision-useful sustainability metrics that support better capital allocation, stronger risk management, and more resilient economic systems.
We thank all contributors and partners involved in this important work and look forward to continuing the dialogue with financial institutions, corporates, and other stakeholders interested in shaping the next generation of resilience-oriented finance.