COVID-19 and Climate: Risk, Mitigation, and Resilience

The document frames the COVID-19 pandemic as a harbinger of future climate-driven crises, noting that both involve unpredictable, compounding risks and systemic failures in political and economic management. It argues that traditional financial risk models are inadequate for the 'new normal' of climate change and calls for collective action from the financial sector to drive decarbonization. The author suggests that mitigation and resilience can be mutually reinforcing, citing examples such as solar-powered microgrids and green recovery programs, while emphasizing the need to limit global temperature rise to below 1.5°C.

• The COVID-19 pandemic and climate change both exhibit 'stochastic' or unpredictable risk characterized by an interplay of factors—such as health, economy, and society—that compound each other and make causal relationships difficult to measure.
• Current political and economic systems are ill-equipped to manage the human relationship with nature and fail to effectively address unmanaged externalities, such as carbon emissions, which create systemic global risk.
• Traditional financial risk management is insufficient for climate change because it relies on historical data and 'normal' distributions, whereas unmitigated climate change will create a 'new normal' exceeding the capacity of any single institution's models.
• Collective action within the financial sector can drive decarbonization, as demonstrated by the Poseidon Principles, where banks holding over 25% of global shipping debt aim to decarbonize the shipping sector.
• Climate mitigation and resilience can be integrated through specific infrastructure and policy, such as solar-powered microgrids in the Caribbean, weatherizing homes, and expanding EV charging networks.

APA

RMI (2020). COVID-19 and Climate: Risk, Mitigation, and Resilience. https://rmi.org/resources/covid-19-and-climate-risk-mitigation-and-resilience/

Chicago

RMI. COVID-19 and Climate: Risk, Mitigation, and Resilience. 2020. https://rmi.org/resources/covid-19-and-climate-risk-mitigation-and-resilience/.

Wikipedia

{{cite press release |author=RMI |title=COVID-19 and Climate: Risk, Mitigation, and Resilience |date=1 April 2020 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/covid-19-and-climate-risk-mitigation-and-resilience/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@misc{rmi2020covid19, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{COVID-19 and Climate: Risk, Mitigation, and Resilience}}, publisher = {RMI}, year = {2020}, month = apr, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/covid-19-and-climate-risk-mitigation-and-resilience/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }