For decades, climate conversations had one centre of gravity: mitigation. Cut emissions. Price carbon. Pledge net-zero. Meanwhile, adaptation sat in the corner, almost an admission of defeat; as if planning to live with a changed climate meant giving up on preventing it.

The climate changed anyway. The rains came later, shorter, and sometimes not at all. The people absorbing the worst of it are smallholder farmers across Africa, for whom a failed season is not a line on a balance sheet but an empty granary in March, an unpaid school fee, or seed eaten that should have been planted.

Yet long before “adaptation” showed up as a funding proposal, African farmers had been doing it for generations. I grew up watching it. My grandfather planted cassava that shrugged off the drought and grew yams that kept long after the harvest was gone. My grandmother chose quicker-maturing maize to beat the failing rains. They didn’t call it adaptation. They called it farming.

That expertise is real, but climate change is outpacing it. What it needs now is capital, at scale.

The capital is not entirely missing; what is missing is the means to move it. Adaptation is hard to finance because its returns are diffuse and slow: you can’t sell a tonne of avoided drought the way you sell a tonne of avoided carbon. That is however a design problem, and design problems can be solved.

The answer lies in building the plumbing: blended vehicles that share the risk, first-loss layers that can make a bank say yes, institutions that aggregate thousands of farms into something capital can reach.

Good intentions don’t move capital. Systems do.