When QCF defined our last strategy in 2023, we were responding to the “new climate reality”: a world moving closer to overshoot, with escalating climate impacts already reshaping lives and livelihoods. That review led us to anchor our work around “climate resilience,” and organise our work around three priorities: “Reduce, Remove and Respond.” 

That was an important shift for us. It helped us move beyond a narrow focus on mitigation, and acknowledge a hard truth: that climate impacts are already here, and that resilience matters alongside emissions reductions. As we wrote last year, we cannot win on decarbonisation if we do not also invest in resilience.

But strategy is not something you set once and then protect from reality. It has to remain fit for purpose. And funding for resilience requires a particular humility, because it is shaped by context and systems that are constantly evolving. 

Staying fit for purpose in a shifting world 

Since we last articulated our strategy, three things have become clearer. 

First, the world has continued to become more volatile, making it harder to separate the climate transition from the wider social and economic context in which it unfolds. A successful climate transition depends not just on science, technologies or targets, but on political legitimacy, public support, and fiscal space. As trust frays and geopolitical pressures intensify, those conditions are harder to sustain. Recent conflict has brought energy prices and cost-of-living pressures sharply back into view, showing how tightly climate, security and economic vulnerability are now bound together. 

Second, our own learning has deepened. The work of the Foundation has been running in parallel to wider philanthropic support from our Founders in the areas of poverty, inequality and human suffering, and over time we have seen increasing intersections between these efforts. Climate change compounds food insecurity, displacement and fragility. And poverty, exclusion and weak institutions shape who is exposed and who can respond. As our Advisory Council member Joshua Amponsem has written, “the climate crisis does not respect thematic boundaries”. People live at the intersection of systems, not funder-defined issues. 

Third, we realised that some of the boundaries in our own strategy no longer reflected the reality we were trying to change. The “three Rs” gave us a useful frame for a moment of transition. But over time, we found ourselves asking a more fundamental question: if climate matters to us because it drives suffering, should our strategy still be organised around climate alone? 

In 2026, we decided the answer was no. 

Three challenges  

This year marks our next phase of evolution. We have decided to bring our founders’ different philanthropic funding streams together into one foundation strategy, spanning three interconnected challenges:  

• Human security: Working with communities and frontline partners to protect lives and uphold dignity during acute crises, including through urgent humanitarian response, and promoting rights and inclusive peace pathways. 

• Poverty and inequality: Supporting people facing persistent poverty and exclusion by tackling structural drivers such as unequal power, unfair economic rules, exclusionary institutions, and discriminatory norms, while backing locally led initiatives that challenge extractive models of growth, governance, and resource distribution. 

• Climate risk: Keeping the system within safe climate limits through a fast, fair transition, and supporting people and communities in climate-exposed regions by strengthening adaption, preparedness, and climate risk management. 

We see these challenges as deeply connected and mutually reinforcing. Addressing them together yields more than the sum of their parts: progress in one challenge area creates compounding benefits for others, leading to stronger and more durable outcomes overall.  

This reflects our core belief: that acute human suffering today, and escalating climate risks ahead, are interconnected crises that threaten the resilience of societies everywhere.  

An updated vision  

This understanding shapes our updated vision:  

A just and resilient world where those most affected by intersecting crises have the power to shape their own futures. 

Resilience remains central to how we think. We continue to define resilience as more than “bouncing back”, because the systems many people are being asked to bounce back into are already unjust, extractive and unstable. For us, true resilience means the capacity of people, communities and ecosystems to respond and transform amid intersecting crises. It is rooted in place, shaped by systems, and constrained by planetary boundaries, including a stable climate. 

Rooted in place  

There is no single blueprint for resilience. The different elements of resilience (ecological, physical, economic, political, social) show up and interact differently in various contexts. The same storm, flood, or heatwave will land and be responded to in distinct ways depending on local environments, cultures, politics, and the lived realities of income, gender, and social ties.  

That means resilience must be built with the knowledge of those closest to the realities of the conditions that will inhibit or unlock it. Places (communities, cities, landscapes) are where the complex drivers of vulnerability can be understood and articulated, and where integrated solutions that can address climate, poverty and inequality together, are born.  

Funding more place-based work means focusing geographically. We are choosing to concentrate our work in places where these dynamics are especially significant. For us, that means the UK, Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. 

We are expanding our work in the UK and Europe, because it is where we have the proximity, relationships and contextual understanding to experiment well. It is also a region in which the politics of climate, inequality and democratic trust are becoming more tightly intertwined, with implications far beyond its borders. 

We are also expanding our work in Sub-Saharan Africa, because of the scale and urgency of intersecting challenges, and the region’s central role in shaping global climate, economic and development futures. 

We will continue to work globally, selecting those transboundary partnerships and coalitions that can amplify, leverage, and strengthen the work of our partners ​​on the ground.   

Shaped by systems 
The conditions that shape resilience in any one place are shaped by wider systems. In practice, three sets of systems matter especially to the challenges we work across. 

The first is energy systems. Reliable and affordable energy underpins livelihoods, healthcare, education and economic development. But energy systems are also at the heart of the climate crisis, as the largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions. A fast, fair and accessible energy transition is therefore central to all three of our challenges. 

The second is natural resource systems. Food, water, land and clean air are the basic conditions of life and security, particularly in places where livelihoods depend directly on nature. Natural systems act as buffers against climate risk. Land and oceans already absorb around half of global CO2 emissions, while forests, wetlands and other ecosystems play a vital role in protecting people from floods, heat, drought and other climate shocks.  

The third is social systems: the institutions, norms and relationships through which energy and natural resources are governed, distributed and controlled. These systems determine who has access to what, whose interests shape the rules, and who is able to influence decisions. The social systems we focus on include governance and democratic systems, civil and cultural systems, knowledge systems, and the financial and economic systems through which value and opportunity flow.  

Pathways of change  
If resilience is shaped by systems, then building resilience means driving systems change. Systems change is uneven, contested and messy. But history shows recurring patterns in how institutions shift, how new ideas take hold, and how power is redistributed. Across very different contexts, some of the key triggers for change are consistent. 

One is the role of changemakers: the activists, entrepreneurs, community organisers, public leaders and innovators who challenge existing arrangements and build  alternatives.  

A second is movements and coalitions - collective action and alliances that can shift incentives, challenge entrenched interests and create the political space for institutions to respond.  

A third is narratives. Systems are held in place by ideas: by what is understood to be normal, fair, credible or possible. Narrative strategies can help shift those underlying assumptions, changing how problems are understood, who is seen as legitimate, and what kinds of futures people are willing to work towards. 

A fourth is knowledge and innovation. New evidence, technologies, practices and  institutional models can expand what is possible, opening pathways that did not previously exist.  

These pathways interact in complex and exciting ways, and this is the work we want to resource and help make possible.  

From climate resilience to resilient societies  

This is the shape of our strategy now: to work across three interconnected challenges -human security, poverty and inequality, and climate risk - by supporting shifts in the key systems that shape them, through the pathways that most often unlock change, in the geographies where we can contribute most meaningfully.  

Focusing on resilience means not only delivering climate outcomes, but changing the underlying systems that drive insecurity and risk. This demands action both to address immediate challenges, protecting dignity today, and to build the conditions for lasting climate and societal transformation over time.  

Secure today. Transform tomorrow.