CLIMATE CHANGE: RESILIENCE BUILDING

Climate Resilience

While we continue to work to reduce carbon emissions, the increasing frequency of more extreme weather like hurricanes, droughts, and floods is affecting people across the world.

For many developing countries, economic prospects will be significantly threatened without effective adaptation to climate change, and many small island states are particularly vulnerable. In some countries, disaster-related economic losses have exceeded 200 percent of GDP—for example when Hurricane Maria struck Dominica in 2017.

Analysis of appropriate adaptation policies must be inherently local and customized to the evolving climate impact on specific regions or sectors, including resilience-building strategies to help prepare for and rebound from disasters.

It is clear, nonetheless, that developing country governments can face very large adaptation costs: importantly, the need for growth-enhancing scaled up infrastructure provides an opportunity for climate-resilient, low-carbon infrastructure spending.

To be successful, the management of this spending, and of financial assistance for it, should be undertaken within a medium-term financial framework consistent with available resources, macro-stability, and debt sustainability.

Climate Change Policy Assessments
Macroeconomic Resilience
Financial Resilience
Post-Disaster Relief

Blogs
Speeches
IMF Books

Climate Change Policy Assessments

The CCPA is a joint IMF-World Bank assessment introduced on a pilot basis in 2017 and provides an overarching assessment of countries’ climate strategies—as articulated in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and other government documents. CCPAs are intended to help countries build coherent macro-frameworks for responding to climate change, which could improve prospects for attracting external finance and put future revisions to NDCs on a sound footing.

Tonga

Blogs

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The Next Phase of the Crisis: Further Action Needed for a Resilient Recovery

July 15, 2020

When the Group of Twenty industrialized and emerging market economies (G-20) finance ministers and central bank governors last met in April, the world was in the midst of the Great Lockdown forced by the outbreak of COVID-19. As they meet virtually this week, many countries are gradually reopening, even as the pandemic remains with us. Clearly, we have entered a new phase of the crisis—one that will require further policy agility and action to secure a durable and shared recovery.

Equity Investors Must Pay More Attention to Climate Change Physical Risk

MAY 29, 2020

The damage from the 2011 floods in Thailand amounted to around 10 percent of Thailand’s GDP, not even considering all the indirect costs through a loss in economic activity in the country and abroad. By some estimates, the total costs of the 2018 wildfires in California were up to $350 billion, or 1.7 percent of U.S. GDP. Every year, climatic disasters cause human suffering as well as large economic and ecological damage. Over the past decade, direct damages of such disasters are estimated to add up to around US$ 1.3 trillion (or around 0.2% of world GDP on average, per year).

Top 6 Blogs on Climate Change

DECEMBER 11, 2019

Actions speak louder than words. The longer we wait to act on climate change, the greater the loss of life and damage to the world economy. Faced with the ongoing existential threat posed by changes to our climate, the United Nations conference known as COP25 is happening in Madrid, Spain. Policymakers with ambition and vision can choose what to do and how to do it, right now, globally and at home.