University of Maryland professor and former senior risk officer at both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Clifford Rossi is available to discuss mortgage industry implications related to recent climate change warnings and projections -- including in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and Reuters’ recent Four major hurricanes forecast for 2022 Atlantic hurricane season.”
Rossi, professor of the practice at Robert H. Smith School of Business, has led the creation of and will teach in a forthcoming UMD Climate Finance and Risk Academy certificate program. And he recently supervised a graduate research team report on “Flood Risk & Financial Vulnerability in US Counties” (available from Rossi by request).
Rossi also can expand on his recent study Assessing the impact of hurricane frequency and intensity on mortgage default risk. This work prompted the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2021 to solicit Rossi’s recommendation for the agency to integrate climate risk management governance and processes into its existing enterprise risk management work. Subsequently, Rossi told Politico, via How climate change could spark the next home mortgage disaster,“It just has not reached that level of concern. And it never does, right? It never reaches the point of people really kind of being forward-thinking about this until the crisis is upon you or about to hit you in the face.”
In addition to his Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac roles, Rossi was Managing Director and Chief Risk Officer for Citigroup’s Consumer Lending Group where he was responsible for overseeing the risk of a $300+B global portfolio of mortgage, home equity, student loans and auto loans with 700 employees under his direction.
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