What will it be like living in Switzerland in 2036, where global average temperatures have pushed past 2°C above pre-industrial levels? How might an Adaptation Economy have developed in Switzerland by 2036 enabling households, enterprises and government with access to the tools of adaptation to meet the challenges of a changed and changing climate to daily life, the economy and national security? To what extent might Switzerland have become a hub of adaptation innovation and entrepreneurship by 2036, fostering its domestic social and economic resilience, attracting investment and exporting its know-how globally?
These are some of the questions we explored in a workshop Morphosis facilitated during GreenUp’s Transformative Finance event at Zurich Climate Week 2026 with a breakout group of financiers, policy makers and entrepreneurs. The purpose was not prediction. Scenarios provide a helpful tool to transport ourselves to plausible future situations, offering a perspective on the decisions and pathways we might follow from today by thinking backwards from futures we might aspire to - or want to navigate away from. Our goal in Zurich was to visualise the markets that might have developed delivering products and systems, services, financing and infrastructure to households, enterprises and public bodies in Switzerland by 2036 - the adaptation markets - enabling them to continue to prosper in the face of ongoing and severe climate changes.
With the sound of trains rumbling overhead the curiously cosy subterranean venue for the workshop, we began the workshop by anchoring the scenario conversation in a post 2°C threshold world in 2036 - meaning Switzerland will be experiencing about 2x that average increase with 2036. In 2024 Switzerland’s temperatures were 2.9°C above pre-industrial levels, relative to a 1.3°C global average. In 2036 Zurich may be logging roughly five times more tropical nights per year, the hottest day around 4.4°C warmer than the 1991–2020 baseline. Summer droughts will be about 44% more intense, rainfall and storms will be heavier and more concentrated, and the winter zero-degree line will have lifted by about 550 metres. Those are not headlines, they are the operating conditions grounded in Switzerland’s FOEN scenarios. Alongside physical changes and events, profound global and local systemic changes can be anticipated affecting value chains for nutrition and industry, regional and global security, migration and finance.
The 15 workshop participants rapidly worked-up a tapestry of scenes for life in Switzerland in 2036: a summer morning commute where it’s 36°C by 9am; alpine valleys whose ski resorts closed in 2032 and which now run eight-month summer economies; mortgage renewals where resilience assessment materially shifts the rate; water bills itemising payments to upstream communities under cantonal watershed-service agreements; agriculture operating a new mix of crops and multiple harvests; new crop mixes including cashews and sugarcane; significantly reduced dairy production as cows struggle with heat; rainfall capture widespread in houses and apartment buildings; battery storage in every home; an overwhelmingly EV-based transport network; air-conditioned self-driving taxis in every city; a national reforestation and urban green canopy programme; adaptation capability export at the vanguard of Swiss national security as the country struggles with immigration; the health system contending with new diseases vectors; the wine industry transitioned to completely new grape varieties trying to scale shading; an infrastructure built for a colder climates in transition; political strain distributing costs across cantons and generations. Not bad for half-an-hour of high level story building.
With some grasp of what living in 2036 Switzerland might look like, the group turned to considering the policy decisions and challenges that may have shaped the journey between 2026 and 2036. Switzerland is unusually well placed to build an effective Adaptation Economy, everyone agreed. The country already has the financial depth, the engineering culture, the federal–cantonal governance scaffolding, and the lived exposure to a fast-warming alpine environment that forces the problem into focus earlier than in many other economies. Yet the group identified challenges with the glacial pace of Swiss policy decisionmaking to respond fast enough, particularly when it comes to adopting new agricultural practices and evolving construction regulations. The country’s approach to education came to the fore as a key lever of opportunity and impediment - would Switzerland be able to foster the entrepreneurial skills necessary to really accelerate a new enterprise and industrial capacity based on the technology and industrial mix of a robust adaptation economy?
While the workshop identified Switzerland’s social cohesion as an asset for adaptation, participants pointed to rising employment opportunity discontent amongst the younger population as a key volatility factor. Perhaps that would turn out to be the driver of a significant shift in public policy, but would it happen soon enough for Switzerland to transition without significant instability?
In research conducted with a number of global partners, Morphosis has proposed a policy framework for building and assessing Adaptation Economies. Encouragingly, the discussions and the issues identified in the Zurich workshop naturally touched on all seven pillars of the framework - risk expectations & behavioural change, financial market strength, economic resilience, infrastructure quality & robustness, social cohesion, governance efficiency & integrity, and entrepreneurship, innovation and technology diffusion.
At the start of the workshop discussion, reviewing the parameters of a Switzerland operating 4°C to 5°C above pre-industrial levels we might have anticipated a dystopian discussion. But instead we emerged with a mix of cautious optimism and positive economic possibility, against a backdrop of sobering challenge and very visible foundational changes. Opinions obviously differed, but the room seemed to arrive at the conclusion Switzerland has the capacity and a profound opportunity to realise a productive future with a robust Adaptation Economy, if it can get out of its own way.
An effective Adaptation Economy, we at Morphosis contend, provides households, businesses and public organisations with affordable and equitable access to adaptation capabilities. The city, regional or national economies that are able to become the engines of adaptation innovation with strong adaptation markets, we argue, will become the drivers of value in a world shaped by the tectonic forces of climate, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and geo-political realignment. Assessing, catalysing and building adaptation markets, and investing in the adaptation solutions that constitute them, is what Morphosis is about.
The short workshop in Zurich provided a glimpse of possible futures for the Adaptation Economy and adaptation markets in Switzerland. What policies might help realise that, and what might hinder it? Which innovations and infrastructural initiatives is Switzerland best placed to advance and should be prioritised? What are the systemic risks and opportunities Switzerland needs to focus on the most? We look forward to exploring those and other questions both in Switzerland and in other markets around the world with policymakers, investors and solution businesses. Morphosis’s mission is to catalyse the adaptation economy, exploring and mapping scenarios for its evolution is a key way we can do that together.
Related reading: Why does the adaptation economy remain invisible to so many investors and policymakers? Niall Murphy and Simon Zadek weigh in on the attention deficit at the heart of climate finance. Read more →
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