Founded in Denmark in 1945 to help rebuild post-war Europe, Ramboll is a global engineering, architecture, and consultancy firm with more than 18,000 experts delivering sustainable solutions for governments and companies worldwide.
Ramboll provides a rare integration of three capabilities: business strategy, climate expertise, and technical engineering. This combination uniquely positions the organization to move sustainability projects from identification and strategy to engineering, implementation, and ongoing management.
Ramboll is a distinctive partner for financial institutions. The firm’s multidisciplinary teams — spanning economics, finance, environmental science, and engineering — work with investors to define what a sustainable investment looks like, set meaningful performance indicators, and track real-world impact over time. HazAtlas, Ramboll’s proprietary climate risk platform, assesses climate hazards at the individual asset level and across complex portfolios.
Senior Managing Consultant Grace Cook works directly with asset managers, infrastructure funds, and private equity firms to embed climate risk assessment across investment portfolios. “Finance is such a powerful lever because it sits upstream of the real economy,” Grace says. “Every dollar allocated either locks in risk or builds resilience. Our job is to help investors tell the difference.”
In this Q&A, Grace shares how sustainability drives value, the role investors play in demonstrating what’s possible in green infrastructure, and a positive vision of the world in 2050.
Global sustainability investment faces scrutiny over whether it drives the same value and ROI as conventional investing, yet significant data suggest that sustainable buildings, green energy, and impact businesses are more successful and valuable in the long term.
Why do you think there is doubt around the ROI of sustainability investments?
First, there’s a time-scale mismatch.
Climate adaptation and sustainability initiatives often pay off over a 10-, 20-, or 30-year horizon, but many capital allocation decisions are made on much shorter cycles: quarterly earnings, private equity hold periods, CEO tenures, LP pressures. So even when the long-term value case is strong, the people making decisions are not always incentivized, or in their seats long enough, to capture that upside.
That creates resistance. Not always ideological resistance, but structural resistance.
Second, there’s invisible risk accumulation.
In my work, doing physical and transition climate risk assessments for investors, the financial materiality of climate risk is already here. It just doesn’t always show up clearly on the balance sheet yet.
Investors may not “see” climate risk until it shows up as a stranded asset, an uninsurable property, a supply chain disruption, a product line exposed to shifting customer demand, or a capex surprise. And by then, value erosion may already be underway.
A big part of what we do at Ramboll is make that invisible climate risk visible and quantifiable, so it can actually inform deal pricing, hold strategy, capex planning, exit value, and investment in adaptation and resilience. If you know flooding, heat, water stress, wildfire exposure, or changing market demand is going to affect an asset over the next 20 years, the question becomes: Why wait until it is catastrophic? Why not phase resilience and transition planning into your investment decisions now?
Third, sustainability has historically been prioritized only when it also delivered quick cost savings. Think LED lighting, energy efficiency retrofits — the easy wins with short paybacks.
Those are important, but they are not enough anymore. We are in a climate crisis, and the scale of what is needed goes well beyond short-payback projects alone.
What are the most compelling data points to support the idea that sustainability creates value?
The most compelling data points come down to this: our wealth, comfort, and investments are already exposed.
Swiss Re estimates that the world could lose around 10 percent of total economic value by mid-century if we don’t achieve the Paris Agreement and net-zero targets. That’s if climate change stays on its current trajectory. In a more severe warming scenario, losses could be much higher.
UNEP estimates the adaptation finance gap in developing countries is roughly $187 billion to $359 billion per year. In plain English, that is the gap between what countries need to spend to prepare for climate impacts and what is actually being financed. That matters globally because supply chains, food systems, manufacturing networks, and infrastructure are deeply connected across those same regions. Governments can provide support but do not have the funds to close this gap on their own.
The positive side is that adaptation can be a very strong investment. WRI found that every $1 invested in adaptation and resilience can generate more than $10 in benefits over 10 years.
So the question is not really about whether sustainability can create value. In many cases, the data is pretty clear that it can. The harder question is whether our financial and decision-making systems are structured to capture value on the timeline the climate actually operates on. Because every time we invest in an asset that is not built for the future it will exist in, we are locking in risk.
Can you describe Ramboll’s work with investors and the role investors can play in accelerating the green transition?
My work, and a big part of what my team does, is focused on supporting asset managers, infrastructure funds, private equity firms, and corporates across the investment lifecycle.
One example of how we do this is during due diligence, where we assess the physical and transition climate risks that could make or break a deal so the client can weigh that information in their transaction decision-making.
Once you own the asset, the question becomes: Where is risk already material, are you adapting faster than the climate risks are materializing, and what questions is the next buyer going to ask when you eventually sell?
This is where our work supports active asset management. We help asset managers understand where to focus attention, communication, capex, insurance conversations, and expectations for portfolio companies.
A good example is a real estate portfolio we worked with that completed a full climate risk assessment, identified its highest-exposure sites, and then made a strategic decision that every asset needed to be operational within 24 hours of a natural disaster. That one decision rippled into design standards, retrofits, emergency planning, acquisition criteria, and tenant communications. It gave the owner a clearer way to show tenants and customers that their businesses could remain online. That’s not just a good plan – it’s a competitive advantage where you benefit from leading the shift of customer expectations.
That is climate risk work translating directly into governance and capital decisions.
While many organizations are working to reduce carbon emissions and deploy renewable energy, scaling these efforts at the pace required to meet current global needs is a significant challenge. How does Ramboll contribute to these efforts?
This is one I think about a lot, because Ramboll sits in a unique position to help move clients from ambition to execution.
My work is on the advisory side: helping investors and corporates identify climate risks, set decarbonization strategies, and figure out where capital and attention need to go.
But the reason that advisory work can have real impact is that Ramboll can also help take clients from risk identification to strategy, engineering, and implementation.
That matters. A lot of firms can produce the strategy deck or engineering drawings. Ramboll connects both, which means the advice is grounded in what is actually buildable, and the engineering is informed by the climate-risk and business context.
On the engineering side, Ramboll has real depth. For example, Ramboll has designed 60 percent of the world’s offshore wind turbine foundations globally. We started in the 80s and haven’t stopped.
Ramboll also works across district energy, green hydrogen, building retrofits, carbon capture, industrial decarbonization, and nature-based solutions like coastal resilience, sustainable drainage, biodiversity, and urban greening. That breadth matters because scaling the transition is not just steel and concrete. It is also adaptation, resilience, ecosystems, land use, and infrastructure that deliver multiple benefits at once.
What is needed in the broader landscape to accelerate the pace of scaling solutions?
Zooming out, I think the broader landscape needs three things.
First, a lot more capital and faster.
Global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025. That sounds huge, and it is. But BloombergNEF estimates that under its net-zero scenario, annual low-carbon investment needs to average $4.8 trillion from 2026 to 2030, then rise to $7.7 trillion from 2031 to 2035. So we need to roughly double the pace this decade, and then go even faster.
Second, we need durable policy.
The IRA is a good example of how quickly capital can move when incentives are clear. In the first two years after it passed, Clean Investment Monitor tracked about $493 billion in actual clean investment, up 71 percent from the prior two-year period.
But it also shows the other side of the coin. When policy durability is questioned, companies pause. They delay final investment decisions. They cancel or downsize projects. Clean Investment Monitor reported that project cancellations accelerated in Q4 2025, including around $8 billion in canceled clean technology manufacturing projects and roughly $9 billion in canceled clean electricity and industrial decarbonization projects.
So the lesson is not just that incentives work. It is that durable incentives work. And for investors, uncertain or diverging regulation is itself a transition risk.
Third, we need the resources and infrastructure to execute.
We can’t build what we can’t staff, and we can’t electrify what we can’t connect to the grid. If we do not have the engineers, electricians, construction workers, planners, permitting staff, operators, transmission capacity, and interconnection processes needed to deliver these projects, then capital and ambition will not translate into deployment.
And the work does not end once capital is deployed. Owners need to manage assets for climate risk and transition performance over time. That means capex planning, resilience investment, operational standards, insurance strategy, and real accountability. That is where advisory and engineering need to stay connected.
Ramboll’s role is helping make scaling executable: combining climate intelligence and advisory, engineering, and implementation across renewables, buildings, industry, infrastructure, and nature-based solutions. The bottleneck is no longer just technology or ambition. It is capital velocity, policy durability, execution capacity, and active management.
What role do investors play in working with organizations and governments to demonstrate what’s possible in renewable energy/green infrastructure?
Investors play a few key roles. One is providing proof-of-concept capital. Ambition and policy can describe what should be possible, but capital is what proves that it is.
Investors, particularly infrastructure funds, private equity, pension capital, and development finance institutions, can help de-risk technologies, markets, and business models for the broader economy. When an investor underwrites a project, they are making a real-world case that the project can work, attract capital, and be repeated.
Investors also help set expectations. When major investors ask for climate risk disclosure, transition planning, emissions data, or resilience planning, companies respond. Sometimes that market pressure moves faster than regulation. In my work, I see investors requiring climate diligence from portfolio companies in ways that can quickly become market norms.
And finally, investors can help prove what’s possible in emerging markets, where the need for clean energy and resilient infrastructure is enormous. But that usually requires partnership. Public capital, development banks, guarantees, and concessional finance often need to absorb early risk, or prove the risk is lower than the market assumes, so private capital can come in at scale.
That is why blended finance and public-private partnerships matter. Every time one of those deals works, it becomes a template that can unlock more capital behind it.
Investors are not just passive funders. They can prove that a project works, set expectations, scale new markets, and help turn isolated projects into repeatable investment models.
What does the world look like in 2050 if we can achieve our shared climate goals?
I want to first acknowledge that even in a world where we’ve achieved a successful climate transition, we would still be living with locked-in warming, higher physical risk, and adaptation needs that last for decades. Some coastlines will have retreated. Some agricultural zones will have shifted. Infrastructure will need to be designed for a different climate than the one it was built for.
The positive version of 2050 is that we have built the systems to manage that risk.
That means climate risk is fully integrated into financial decisions, not sitting in a separate ESG report. It is built into underwriting, due diligence, insurance, asset management, capital planning, infrastructure design, and public-sector budgeting.
When I picture 2050, I picture a world where climate risk as a financial discipline has matured. Physical climate risk data is as standard as credit ratings. Transition risk is priced more clearly through carbon taxes and market premiums.
Adaptation infrastructure, nature-based solutions, circular economy businesses, and transition finance are mainstream investment categories, not niche impact plays.
The honest version of 2050 is not that we “solved” climate change. It is that we got off the current trajectory, reached net zero fast enough to avoid the worst outcomes, and built the financial, governmental, scientific, and engineering systems to manage the impacts already locked in.
That is the win I am working toward.
