Theme 3: Investing through an AMR lens

• Session 5: Capital ideas: Impact investing is sustainable and scalable
• Session 6: The FAIRR initiative on AMR: what’s next for investor action
• Session 7: Blended finance: moving capital in a constrained world

Impact investing is expanding what’s possible in AMR, bringing capital, intention, and innovation together to drive real-world change. This session explored how impact investing and innovative financing can help realign capital flows with long-term health, environmental and societal outcomes, and how public, private and philanthropic actors can work together to close persistent investment gaps. 

Summary 

Many AMR solutions struggle to scale despite clear need and technical readiness. A central argument was that capital is abundant globally, but returns rarely reflect the full social, environmental, and economic costs of antimicrobial resistance. AMR was framed as a systems problem in which benefits accrue broadly to society, while revenues often remain narrow, delayed, or misaligned creating a structural investment gap. 

 Financing impact 

The discussion outlined four practical ways the gap between private returns and public benefit can be funded. First, through regulatory or policy mechanisms that price externalities or create economic incentives, effectively embedding public benefit into investable returns. Second, through philanthropic or government funding, including schemes such as carbon credits or social infrastructure programs, which transfer the value of externalities to the investment vehicle. Third, through the creation of a ‘greenium’, where products or services command a premium because consumers value the positive outcomes they generate. Finally, through innovation-driven advantage, where unique technology or delivery models create a competitive moat, such as patent protection, proprietary data or regulatory exclusivity, that enables outsized returns despite broader system constraints. 

Impact investing was introduced as a practical framework for addressing this mismatch by explicitly considering risk, return and impact together. Rather than treating impact as an add on, speakers emphasised that all capital investment generates impacts, be they positive or negative, intended or unintended, and that making these impacts visible enables better investment decisions. This approach extends beyond exclusionary screening to actively supporting solutions that prevent harm and address underinvestment in prevention, supply chains, and One Health interventions. 

Panellists emphasised that different forms of capital play complementary roles. Philanthropy, government, and private investors operate with distinct objectives, time horizons, and risk tolerances. When philanthropic or public capital is combined with private capital, each deployed for what it does best, it becomes possible to fund externalities, absorb early risk, and improve investment viability. This alignment can unlock significantly larger flows of private capital into businesses and initiatives that deliver broader social good, including AMR solutions whose public benefits far exceed their near-term revenues. 

Examples from health, infrastructure, and social outcomes, including vaccine delivery, eye health, road safety, and mission‑aligned healthcare endowments, illustrated how blended finance, outcome-linked instruments and mission-aligned endowments can mobilise significantly larger pools of capital. A recurring theme was that financing challenges are also design challenges: data, incentives, behaviour, and governance shape where capital flows and whether it delivers durable impact. Applying thematic lenses to investment such as gender, climate or potentially AMR was presented as a way to systematically identify risks, opportunities and leverage points across portfolios, value chains, and markets. 

Session 6: The FAIRR initiative on AMR: what’s next for investor action

Antimicrobial resistance is a rising threat to health, food systems, and global markets but investors can be the game‑changers. This session explored how finance can power smarter solutions, integrate AMR into risk and sustainability frameworks, and spark the same momentum that’s transforming climate and biodiversity action.  

Summary 

The session reframed antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a material financial risk with direct implications for global growth, portfolio resilience and longterm investment returns. Evidence presented highlighted that AMR already contributes to millions of deaths annually, rising healthcare costs, productivity losses and supply chain disruption, with projections indicating a potential permanent drag on global GDP if left unaddressed. For diversified investors, this translates into broad exposure across healthcare, food systems, labour markets, and infrastructure. 

AMR as systemic financial risk 

AMR was characterised as a nonlinear systemic risk. Once antibiotics lose effectiveness, impacts cascade across sectors rather than remaining confined to health systems with the insight that approximately 10% of global equity markets are already exposed to AMR-related risk. Animal agriculture was identified as a high‑leverage, modifiable AMR risk, with antibiotic practices in livestock creating regulatory and reputational exposure that increasingly concentrates in restaurant and branded food supply chains. Resistant organisms do not remain contained within production systems, moving instead through food, water, soil and human populations creating regulatory, reputational and transition risks for companies and investors alike. 

Despite this exposure, the discussion emphasised that AMR remains poorly understood across much of the investment community and is rarely treated as a core material risk alongside climate, biodiversity, food safety, or water. Limited awareness, technical complexity and fragmented data were identified as key barriers to investor action. Where AMR is addressed, it is often framed as a values-based issue rather than a question of financial risk management and fiduciary duty. 

The discussion also highlighted a less visible constraint on investor action: divergent interpretations of responsible investment. Some investors exclude parts of animal agriculture entirely based on ethical or sustainability mandates, focusing instead on themes such as plant-based diets, carbon or climate transition. While these approaches reflect legitimate values, they can also mean that some investors with strong sustainability credentials are not engaging with the very sectors where AMR risks are most acute. As a result, companies with significant exposure to antibiotic use may receive less scrutiny, not more. This dynamic is compounded by limited understanding of how AMR manifests across everyday products and systems from food and water to crop production and supply chains reinforcing gaps between investor intent and effective risk management. 

The panel underscored the role of investor stewardship as a primary lever for change. Engagement with publicly listed companies particularly those that produce, rely on, or contribute to antibiotic use was highlighted as critical to improving disclosure, aligning practices with international guidelines, and reducing unmanaged risk in portfolios. Shareholder resolutions, collaborative engagement initiatives and the use of benchmarking and performance data were presented as practical tools to shift corporate behaviour. 

Collaboration emerged as a central theme. Given the systemic nature of AMR, no single investor can mitigate the risk alone. Collective action through investor networks, shared data platforms and coordinated engagement was shown to amplify influence and credibility, particularly when underpinned by robust, comparable evidence. The session also drew parallels with climate risk, noting that delayed action increases costs and narrows the window for effective intervention. 

While the focus was on risk, the discussion also identified investment opportunities. Innovation in diagnostics, vaccines, medical technologies, surveillance, prevention and precision use of antimicrobials offers pathways to reduce AMR while supporting productivity and resilience. However, panellists noted that many of these solutions face scaling challenges, reinforcing the need for patient capital, blended finance and supportive policy environments. 

Session 7: Blended finance: moving capital in a constrained world

As global health needs grow and aid budgets tighten, blended finance offers a way to stretch scarce resources further. By using public or philanthropic funds to attract private investment, it can open new pathways for action on AMR and health system resilience.  

Summary 

This session explored how blended finance can unlock investment for AMR by reshaping risk, incentives and value creation, drawing lessons from climate, gender and animal health. Speakers stressed that AMR’s challenge is not a lack of science or solutions, but the absence of financial structures, products, and demand signals that translate those solutions into investable opportunities. 

Blended finance adjusts risk–return economics 

The discussion positioned blended finance as a tool for deliberately altering deal and market economics, rather than a permanent subsidy or an alternative asset class. Its function is to deploy concessional capital (e.g. first loss guarantee, lower return) in a temporary and targeted way to absorb early risk, prove commercial viability and crowd in private investment, with the clear expectation that it steps back rather than replaces markets. Even relatively small concessional commitments can materially reshape risk–return profiles and unlock far larger volumes of commercial capital, but only where there is a credible pathway to self-sustaining demand. For AMR, this requires moving beyond a compliance framing and treating investment as a value-creation proposition. Lessons from gender‑lens and climate finance show that interventions that are costs, even when beneficial, are rarely sustained, whereas those linked to productivity, resilience and competitive advantage, particularly in sustainable agriculture and export‑oriented systems, are more likely to persist and scale. 

The session emphasised that the core constraint is not a lack of solutions or willingness to change, but the absence of demand certainty and viable market design. Where predictable revenue signals exist through procurement mechanisms, export standards, insurance or compensation frameworks, farmers and producers are willing to invest in AMR-reducing practices. Where those signals are missing, even cost-effective technologies struggle to scale. This matters because proven, revenue-generating AMR solutions already exist. Animal vaccines, diagnostics, nutrition and precision livestock systems are commercially profitable, growing markets, yet their uptake is constrained by fragmented regulation, high upfront costs and uncertain demand rather than technical feasibility. Addressing these barriers also requires rethinking business models and how value is priced, paid for and rewarded. Experience from the health sector, including vaccines and advanced market commitments, demonstrates that reshaping demand can fundamentally alter R&D and investment economics. While there is clear scope for innovation in business models, the underlying reality remains that attracting capital ultimately requires credible returns. 

A further lesson drawn from climate finance was the risk of overfocusing on large, easily packaged projects at the expense of smaller actors. While large projects can mobilise capital quickly, they often overlook the critical role of small firms, farmers and local distributors. The climate sector is now playing catchup in engaging small companies that help create a pipeline line of innovation through to lastm-ile delivery and adoption. The same lesson applies to AMR. Scaling effective practices will require attention not only to large producers or listed firms, but also to the local pipeline of innovation, where entrepreneurship is inherently contextual and place-based. Supporting entrepreneurs and small enterprises in emerging markets through financing structures tailored to their cultural, regulatory, and geographic realities was identified as essential to translating AMR science into durable, investable systems change. 

A similar structural gap explains why One Health succeeds scientifically but fails financially. Budget lines, mandates and accountability remain siloed across human health, veterinary services and environmental portfolios, leaving prevention investments stranded between sectors. Investors, meanwhile, cannot allocate capital to what is not clearly defined. Across agriculture, water and climate funds, AMR rarely appears as a distinct product or lens. The implication is that AMR investment will scale fastest when embedded within existing value chains, supported by timebound concessional capital, clear revenue signals, and investable products that translate scientific solutions into financial propositions. 

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