17.12.2019

InsuResilience Global Partnership participation at the Development and Climate (D&C) Days COP25 2019

The Development and Climate (D&C) Days event, on the sidelines of COP25 in Madrid are a strategic partnership platform aiming to influence the ‘ambition mechanism’ processes under the UNFCCC and provide an opportunity for researchers, practitioners and negotiators to discuss news, ideas and solutions on climate change and development.

This year’s D&C Days stood under the motto “Pathways to a climate-resilient future” and featured five different thematic focuses: resilient food and agriculture systems, early warning and early action, financing a resilient future, resilient cities and infrastructure as well as nature-based resilience.

The InsuResilience Global Partnership supported this year’s D&C Days as a host partner. It also co-shaped a session on social protection and its role in building climate resilience. As part of theme  “Building resilient food and agriculture systems,” the session shed light on how integrating climate risk management into social protection offers an opportunity to support the poorest households, reduce vulnerabilities, and mitigate negative coping strategies.

The integration of risk finance and insurance elements as a means to strengthen the adaptive capacity of social protection systems was a central part of these discussions. For example, governments may use insurance as contingency financing mechanism to scale up social protection in anticipation or response to a shock. Social protection design may also benefit from insurance-like principles to support evidence-based decision making, for example through data-driven, rules-based triggers and corresponding disaster response plans. Finally, risk-layered strategies as one element of disaster risk finance may help address different types of risk for a more efficient climate risk management, for example, by ‘piggybacking’ insurance on existing social protection systems.

Overall, the D&C Days exhibited that local communities are generating a tremendous amount of knowledge on how to live better on a warming planet. But that bottom-up expertise may not always be utilized by governments to shape climate change policy at the global level. The event closed with a strong message that international efforts to help the world’s poorest adjust to more extreme weather and rising seas should not neglect what those communities have already learned, rather empower them to put their ideas into practice.