Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems (CoFiRES)

The UNC Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems (CoFiRES) is jointly housed in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC’s Institute for the Environment. We focus on understanding the links between financial losses and drought, hurricanes and other extreme environmental events. By developing integrated models of natural, engineered, economic and financial systems, we provide better estimates of the likelihood and severity of environmentally-related financial risks. Our research includes:

• Translating variability in environmental processes (e.g., rainfall, streamflow, temperature, wind) into variability in financial outcomes (e.g., revenues, costs) to provide improved assessments of financial risk. This information is designed to be useful to lenders, investors, credit ratings agencies and insurers/reinsurers, as well as others focused on understanding financial risk.
• Developing novel financial instruments, such as index insurance, to help individuals, businesses and government agencies manage environmental financial risks.
• Creating innovative risk management strategies to combat increasingly complex environmental challenges, using new and existing tools for risk reduction, risk retention and risk transfer.