A ferocious pandemic is sweeping the globe, What follows is our attempt at providing some initial threatening lives and livelihoods at an alarming answers to these questions, in the hope that they rate. As infection and death rates continue to rise, will inspire ideas and actions that help connect our resident movement is restricted, economic activity immediate crisis response with priorities for recovery. is curtailed, governments resort to extraordinary measures, and individuals and corporations scramble to adjust. In the blink of an eye, the Potential lessons from the current coronavirus has upended the world’s operating pandemic assumptions. Now, all attention is focused on Understanding the similarities, the differences, and countering this new and extreme threat, and on the broader relationships between pandemics and blunting the force of the major recession that is climate risk is a critical first step if we are to derive likely to follow. practical implications that inform our actions. Amid this dislocation, it is easy to forget that just Fundamental similarities a few short months ago, the debate about climate Pandemics and climate risk are similar in that change, the socioeconomic impacts it gives rise to, they both represent physical shocks, which then and the collective response it calls for were gaining translate into an array of socioeconomics impacts. momentum. Sustainability, indeed, was rising on the By contrast, financial shocks—whether bank runs, agenda of many public- and private-sector leaders— bubble bursts, market crashes, sovereign defaults, before the unsustainable, suddenly, became or currency devaluations—are largely driven by impossible to avoid. human sentiment, most often a fear of lost value or liquidity. Financial shocks originate from within Given the scope and magnitude of this sudden crisis, the financial system and are frequently remedied and the long shadow it will cast, can the world afford by restoring confidence. Physical shocks, however, to pay attention to climate change and the broader can only be remedied by understanding and sustainability agenda at this time? Our firm belief is addressing the underlying physical causes. Our that we simply cannot afford to do otherwise. Not recent collective experience, whether in the public only does climate action remain critical over the or the private sector, has been more often shaped next decade, but investments in climate-resilient by financial shocks, not physical ones. The current infrastructure and the transition to a lower-carbon pandemic provides us perhaps with a foretaste future can drive significant near-term job creation of what a full-fledged climate crisis could entail in while increasing economic and environmental terms of simultaneous exogenous shocks to supply resiliency. And with near-zero interest rates for the and demand, disruption of supply chains, and global foreseeable future, there is no better time than the transmission and amplification mechanisms. present for such investments. Pandemics and climate risk also share many of the To meet this need and to leverage this opportunity, same attributes. Both are systemic, in that their we believe that leaders would benefit from direct manifestations and their knock-on effects considering three questions: propagate fast across an interconnected world. Thus, the oil-demand reduction in the wake of the — What lessons can be learned from the current initial coronavirus outbreak became a contributing pandemic for climate change? factor to a price war, which further exacerbated the stock market decline as the pandemic grew. They — What implications—positive or negative—could are both nonstationary, in that past probabilities our pandemic responses hold for climate action? and distributions of occurrences are rapidly shifting and proving to be inadequate or insufficient for — What steps could companies, governments, and future projections. Both are nonlinear, in that their individuals take to align our immediate pandemic socioeconomic impact grows disproportionally response with the imperatives of sustainability? and even catastrophically once certain thresholds Addressing climate change in a postpandemic world 107