The Legibility Problem Across Real Assets: Adaptation and resilience finance without a shared language

Adaptation and resilience are used across sustainable finance regulation, physical risk management, and built environment practice, but not consistently. This paper argues the disagreement is structural: adaptation responds to a permanently shifted baseline, while resilience concerns proximity to irreversible system thresholds, and conflating them produces instruments designed for one problem and deployed against the other. The paper then examines where this fragmentation becomes operationally costly in the built environment, through building regulations, valuation practice, and insurance withdrawal.