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Abstract: Climate change poses a powerful new imperative to support micro and small businesses (MSEs) in obtaining financing. This is especially true in the developing world, where the negative effects of climate change are most acute and the need for small-business finance is the most pressing, in part because businesses are overwhelmingly MSEs. At the same time, climate change makes the task all the more difficult by exacerbating existing risks and introduction new ones in a lending environment already fraught with uncertainty and thin margins. To escape from this catch-22, reforms are needed to make secured financing laws around the world more responsive to lenders’ concerns, following the well-worn example of developing economies that have shown the promise of such reforms. This article surveys the primary impacts of climate change on lender’s confidence in extending secured financing, before proceeding to catalogue the main ways in which secured financing laws and regulations might be amended to brace lenders’ confidence and therefore willingness to lend on a secure basis to MSEs.
Keywords climate change; collateral; lender’s concerns; MSEs; secured transactions; small business loans
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