Lessons from COVID-19 for managing transboundary climate risks and building resilience

Abstract

COVID-19 has revealed how challenging it is to manage global, systemic and compounding crises. Like COVID-19, climate change impacts, and maladaptive responses to them, have potential to disrupt societies at multiple scales via networks of trade, finance, mobility and communication, and to impact hardest on the most vulnerable. However, these complex systems can also facilitate resilience if managed effectively. This review aims to distil lessons related to the transboundary management of systemic risks from the COVID-19 experience, to inform climate change policy and resilience building. Evidence from diverse fields is synthesised to illustrate the nature of systemic risks and our evolving understanding of resilience. We describe research methods that aim to capture systemic complexity to inform better management practices and increase resilience to crises. Finally, we recommend specific, practical actions for improving transboundary climate risk management and resilience building. These include mapping the direct, cross-border and cross-sectoral impacts of potential climate extremes, adopting adaptive risk management strategies that embrace heterogenous decision-making and uncertainty, and taking a broader approach to resilience which elevates human wellbeing, including societal and ecological resilience.

Interactions between climate and COVID-19

“…As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect communities globally, it is important that planning and response considers these implications, as well as the complications from ongoing climate extremes. 10 Connecting research, practitioner, and policy-making communities within public health, disaster preparedness, emergency management, humanitarian response, and development planning sectors is imperative for informing more integrated responses across sectors and geographic scales. For example, responses to challenges affecting health, livelihoods, and wellbeing have had success in reducing disruption caused by COVID-19 and climate extremes ( appendix pp 16–17 ).…”

“…Although the dynamics of the interactions between COVID-19 and these challenges are poorly understood, with little research taking a holistic look at how COVID-19 intersects with these diverse challenges, their co-occurrence can create effects that have consequences in areas other than the health domain and can weaken the resilience of multiple sectors of social–ecological systems. 4 , 10 , 11 , 12 The potential for compound risks or complex health emergencies could be counteracted by changes that have enhanced health and livelihoods, including technological developments, food sovereignty, improved communications technology, community empowerment, and lessons from previous pandemics.…”

“…2020 and 2021 were characterised by notable climatic extremes, creating substantial interest in the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic with climate risks. Research to date has investigated lessons learned from COVID-19 for climate policy, 10 , 13 , 14 , 15 disaster preparedness, 16 , 17 and support for climate action; 18 , 19 compared the politics of responding to COVID-19 with the politics of responding to climate change; 20 examined implications of the pandemic for greenhouse gas emissions 21 , 22 and the environment as a whole; 23 , 24 and focused on how to improve the sustainability of recovery packages to fulfil the UN Build Back Better campaign goals. 25 , 26 , 27 Studies have also focused on the associations between weather and COVID-19 transmission and, to a lesser extent, the ways climatic factors affect lived experience of and response to COVID-19.…”

Climate Impact Storylines for Assessing Socio-Economic Responses to Remote Events

“…biannual trade reviews carried out by the European branch of the World Trade Organization), access to strategic materials and technology, and disclosure of climate risks by major financial institutions (Ünüvar, 2019). The storyline approach provides an instrument to the required toolkit for stress testing major socio-economic interruptions similar to those that have been demonstrated in the COVID19 pandemic situation (Ringsmuth et al, 2022). Recent studies using the Acclimate model have proven to produce realistic and useful results in disaster impact analysis (Willner et al, 2018;Kuhla et al, 2021).…”

“…The societal impacts are not only governed by the physical hazard and the resulting effect cascades, but are also strongly linked to the societal risk response (Simpson et al, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a growing awareness of transboundary implications and considerable complexity of systemic risks (Phillips et al, 2020;Ringsmuth et al, 2022), including climate change (Challinor et al, 2017;Gaupp, 2020;IPCC, 2022). Assessment of impacts resulting from remote climate change features requires an analysis framework that embraces a "systemic risk" approach (Hochrainer-Stigler et al, 2020) and acknowledges complex interactions between risk attributes (Simpson et al, 2021).…”