From a worksheet in Songdo to a platform being built, Vidya Soundarajan, Founder and CEO of Eyekyam Risk Resolutions, traces her journey through the Resilience Frontiers continuum.
Songdo, South Korea. April 2019. The Korea Global Adaptation Week. The launch of the UNFCCC Resilience Frontiers programme.
We were envisioning a resilient future post-2030, with nearly 100 people of varied expertise. Among them, a Japanese climate scientist, an Indian fish biologist, a French space mission director, an Australian blockchain researcher, a doctor, a school teacher, a military person, an intern from Bangladesh, a Mexican banker, a Greek business analyst, and many more.
We spent 3 days unlearning our perspectives that were entrenched in trouble-shooting the problems of today, and started creating magic moonshots on sheets of paper in groups of diverse disciplines.
I was in that room.
And we spent a full week wrestling with one question: what does resilience actually look like at the frontier?
Not the policy version.
The real version. The one where communities, ecosystems, and financial systems all have to hold together simultaneously, under stress. I remember the intensity of those days. The arguments about evidence standards. What “verifiable” really means when you are talking about adaptation outcomes in a river basin in South Asia or a coastal zone in East Africa. The barely-contained frustration of people who understood both the urgency and the inadequacy of the tools available.
What crystallised for me in Songdo was this: the gap between what the climate science community could measure and what the financial system could price was not just a policy gap. It was an infrastructure gap. The data pipelines, the verification architecture, the trusted evidence trails that would allow field-level climate outcomes to be translated into priceable financial instruments, none of it existed yet. Not because no one had tried. Because the technology to build it reliably, at scale, equitably, had not yet converged. That infrastructure needed to be built, I slowly realised.
Pathway 3 in Practice: When the Trifecta Converges
Resilience Frontiers’ Pathway 3 calls for universal and equitable access to, and stewardship of, big data and frontier technologies.
In Songdo, this was a horizon we could describe but not yet reach. What has changed in the seven years since is not the vision. It is the scaffolding.
Three technologies have crossed the threshold of practical readiness simultaneously, and their convergence is what makes the infrastructure gap closeable now.
Blockchain provides the immutable evidence trail, ensuring that data moving from a field sensor to a financial instrument is tamper-proof and auditable at every step.
AI now processes climate data at a granularity unthinkable in 2019, making the measurement problem that dominated those Songdo debates genuinely solvable.
IoT closes the loop at the field level, live readings from the actual locations where climate risk plays out, not modelled proxies.
Together, they transform what was once a conceptual infrastructure into something that can be engineered, deployed, and governed equitably. That is the trifecta. That is what changed.
The Moonshot Worksheet
There was an exercise at Songdo where we were asked to imagine what we would build if we could, absolutely unconstrained.
What we wrote down that day was essentially the architecture of a data trust for nature: a system that could ingest verifiable field-level climate signals, create auditable evidence trails, and connect those trails to the financial instruments that adaptation outcomes need to unlock. Cambridge Analytica-level data sourcing rigour, applied not to manipulating human behaviour but to valuing nature assets at their true worth.
That worksheet has since evolved into two interconnected platforms at Eyekyam Risk Resolutions. The first is a foundational PaaS for risk-native climate finance infrastructure. The second, now taking shape is DONN: Data Oracle Networks for Nature, designed to do exactly what I sketched in Songdo: create the trusted, field-grounded data layer that bridges climate science and capital markets – but with a dimension that feels even more important to me now, as it puts communities at the centre of the data economy, not at the periphery.
Take a mangrove ecosystem on a coastline in South or Southeast Asia. The community that lives alongside it, protects it, and depends on it has always been the real steward of that ecosystem but has never been compensated as one. DONN changes that equation. Community members with IoT sensors capture real-time ecological data from the mangrove. AI validates and processes it into verifiable climate outcomes, flood protection, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity indicators. Blockchain creates the immutable record. And critically, the community owns that data. They can license it to insurers pricing coastal risk, to carbon markets verifying offsets, to governments planning adaptation investments. The ecosystem generates value, and for the first time, the people who actually look after it are in a position to capture that value directly.
This is what equitable stewardship of frontier technologies actually looks like in practice. Not access to tools owned by someone else but the ownership of the infrastructure itself. And I am not building it alone. The universe sent a co-founder from a completely different world, Cdr. Ashley Derrick, a retired Naval Aviator, carrying the exact technical and business architecture skillset I was missing.
This too feels like a Resilience Frontiers principle made manifest: the most durable solutions emerge from genuinely diverse expertise.
Living in the Continuum
When Youssef Nassef responded to that Sunday morning post, he said I had been “one of the most inspiring contributors at the RF launch event in Songdo.” I felt the weight of the seven years between then and now, not as a gap, but as a continuum.
Resilience Frontiers gave me, in 2019, a language for what I was trying to build before I had a company, a co-founder, or a product. It told me the frontier was real. That the infrastructure gap was not an obstacle, it was an invitation.
Some things take seven years. Some things take exactly as long as they need to.
The question we wrestled with in Songdo: What does resilience actually look like at the frontier?
This is still the ‘question’ I wake up with. Now, we are building the answer.