Researchers at the Columbia Climate School have published a paper which seeks to distinguish between different types of responses to climate-related risks, and the roles of different institutional actors in advancing these actions.
Six distinct responses:
- Mitigation: Reducing underlying planetary hazards by decarbonising energy, land-use, and industrial systems
- Resilience: Reducing economic and social vulnerability to physical climate impacts through infrastructure, ecosystems, land-use planning and social protections
- Risk sharing: Absorbing and allocating financial losses once climate impacts occur, through insurance, reinsurance, capital markets, fiscal transfers and public guarantee mechanisms
- Fiscal resilience: Preserving governments’ capacity to finance disaster response, reconstruction and stabilisation as climate costs compound
- Exposure management: Limiting foreseeable financial losses by adjusting underwriting standards, credit assessments and portfolio allocation
- Financial system stability: Preventing correlated failures and sustaining credit flows and financial intermediation as climate-related shocks propagate
The paper was authored by associate professor Lisa Sachs and graduate student researchers Danielle Fujimoto and Quentin Harel.
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