CMCC Lectures
22 September 2026, 14.00 CEST | Online
To join the Lecture, register here
As climate extremes intensify, so do their economic consequences. Join Professor Gregory Characklis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to explore how droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms are reshaping financial risk across key sectors. Discover advanced approaches to measuring, managing and transferring risk, and learn how innovative strategies can build resilience in a rapidly changing world.
The effects of extreme environmental events such as droughts, floods, heatwaves and violent storms go beyond the physical impacts, causing global economic losses that approach $500 billion each year.
In this CMCC Lecture, Professor Gregory Characklis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will examine how environmental extremes can affect the costs and revenues of both public and private-sector actors, generating financial instability that can be disruptive and influence decisionmaking in significant ways.
Understanding the nature of these risks requires integrated modeling of natural (for example, hydrologic), engineered (like reservoirs) and economic and financial systems (like electricity markets). But characterizing the financial risks is just the first step: they also must be managed. This is often achieved with a combination of actions and tools that involve risk reduction (such as infrastructure), risk retention (for example, cash reserves) and risk transfer (like insurances). For the most severe events, risk transfer via more sophisticated financial instruments can be especially effective in enabling advanced risk management strategies that are both adaptable and cost-effective.
Join the discussion as the Lecture explores approaches to characterising financial risk in coupled natural-engineered-economic systems, draws on recent studies at the forefront of the field and presents strategies for managing the financial risk of environmental extremes on economic sectors such as urban water utilities, electric power utilities, inland navigation and the housing market.
Speaker: Gregory W. Characklis, Ph.D., William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor Dept. of Environmental Sciences & Engineering, Director, Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Discussant: Silvia Torresan, CMCC and Ca’Foscari University of Venice
Moderator: Andrea Castelletti, CMCC and Politecnico di Milano
Dr. Characklis serves as William. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), as well as the Director of UNC’s Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation, a pan-campus research and teaching unit that is supported by more than 40 industry partners. His primary research interests involve assessing and managing the financial risks of extreme events through modeling of interdisciplinary systems, research currently funded by a range of state and federal agencies, as well as the private sector.
Dr. Characklis has served on the Editorial Boards of Water Security and Water Resources Research. He has also served on the Boards of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (serving as President in 2015-16), and the Consortium for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences Inc. (CUAHSI). Prior to joining UNC, Dr. Characklis served as Director of Resource Development and Management at Azurix Corp. (a subsidiary of Enron Corp.) where his responsibilities centered around assessing the technical and financial merits of water development projects. Before entering the private sector, he spent two years as a Fellow with the National Academy of Engineering in Washington DC. Dr. Characklis holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. from Rice University and a B.S. from Johns Hopkins University.
The event is part of the CMCC Lectures webinar series, which presents frontier topics and solutions in climate sciences and action, through the insights of leading experts. The series provides a platform for prominent scientists to showcase their cutting-edge research and engage in dialogue with peers and stakeholders.