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The year 2023 has been a notable year in the context of climate change. It has drawn attention to the reality of climate change through its record-breaking heat and severe weather events. These events painfully remind us that climate change is not a distant threat but today’s reality. The year’s unusually high temperatures and extreme weather events highlight the need for international efforts to address climate change, emphasizing the importance of integrated approaches of climate risk management strategies.

The CREWS 2022 Annual Report maps and illustrates how the Climate Risk Early Warning System (CREWS) initiative is making the world safer with early warning. It captures progress against key programme indicators since the initiative’s first projects. The CREWS initiative is a specialized fund for climate action that saves lives and livelihoods in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS). It helps countries and regions build strong and sustainable early warning systems providing timely, accurate and accessible climate risk and weather services to enable early action. Through tailored country-driven projects, the inititive strengthens national and regional institutions to better protect people hardest hit by climate change.

The InsuResilience Annual Report 2022 offers a concise overview of the milestones and highlights under the framework of the InsuResilience Global Partnership throughout the last year, especially the development and launch of the Global Shield against Climate Risks. You can find information on where the Partnership stands in reaching the targets defined under Vision 2025 in the “InsuResilience at a Glance” article. The current state of the Partnership’s collective ambition to scale Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI) in vulnerable countries encompasses 29 active programmes with 475 projects in 123 countries worldwide. Thanks to these efforts, 190 million people were financially protected through CDRFI solutions as per end of 2022.

The 2022 Climate Risk Insurance Annual Report of the World Food Programme (WFP) highlights key insights and achievements from WFP-supported Climate Risk Insurance (CRI) programmes. It provides deep dives into WFP-supported CRI programmes in each country, as well as stories from the field, interviews with partners, and insights into how WFP promotes gender equality and women’s empowerment in its programmes. In 2022, WFP provided financial protection to over 3.8 million people across 21 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, through climate risk insurance instruments. In regions affected by droughts, floods, and hurricanes, these insurance products provided much-needed payouts to support 1.8 million people with a total of US$12.6 million.

The InsuResilience Solutions Fund’s (ISF) Annual Report 2022 highlights the activities and developments of the Fund throughout the past year. The ISF has made substantial progress in strengthening climate risk management, as well as Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI) architecture, globally. 2022 was a year marked simultaneously by large scale climate disasters, and groundbreaking global commitments towards addressing climate-related loss and damage. In this context, ISF made considerable progress in supporting climate risk insurance solutions to close the protection gap for vulnerable populations, recording a growing number of activities and reaching 49 projects in 27 countries to date. 2022 also marked the launch of the Global Risk Modelling Alliance (GRMA), and the start of its first project, which aims to develop climate risk modelling capabilities in Pakistan together with its Ministry of Climate Change.

Oxford Policy Management evaluated the African Risk Capacity (ARC), which provides sovereign and other insurance and builds capacity in member countries to respond to climate disasters. The evaluation, financed by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Agence Française de Développement, looked at ARC’s work to grow insurance risk pools and strengthen country capacity to respond, as well as its longer-term sustainability. A detailed value for money analysis was also undertaken. It found that ARC has strengthened capacity to respond to drought through contingency planning and insurance in 17 out of 35 member states. Its support is widely valued by recipients. However, the distribution of support to beneficiary households by governments that received a payout often did not happen within the mandated time period, undermining its main objective. The capacity built often does not appear to be sustainable beyond ARC’s support. The value for money assessment rated economy and efficiency as adequate and adequate-to-good, respectively. It was rated less well on effectiveness and equity, due to the problems in reaching beneficiaries on time and challenges in government targeting processes. ARC’s drought insurance risk pool has grown considerably in recent years – due in a large part to subsidies on insurance premiums and a programme of parallel insurance for NGO networks. However, ARC is facing a significant financing and organisational challenges. A set of recommendations are made to address the evaluation findings.

The 3rd edition of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) Annual Report is available. Download the report to learn about all MCII engagements and activities for the June 2021 – June 2022 period.

Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) SPC Annual Report 2021/22 describes CCRIF’s activities and accomplishments during policy year 2021/22 as well as their contribution to the seven strategic objectives. The report presents a new Vision as we move toward 2025 and beyond: A leading global development insurer, providing disaster risk financing products and services to member countries to improve lives and livelihoods, building resilience and advancing sustainable development agendas.

This study aims to further global understanding on the uptake, size and value of premium and capital support (PCS). It follows a call in the InsuResilience Evidence Roadmap for follow-up work to explore the macro-level factors that influence governments’ ‘willingness and capacity’ to take out climate and disaster risk finance and insurance (CDRFI), as well as the incentives that could be created to enable and promote this. The study also builds on IGP’s previous conceptual work on SMART PCS Principles (Töpper and Stadtmüller, 2021) and a Monitoring and Evaluation Guidance Note (IGP, 2021) which examines the efficacy of PCS solutions to support insurance vehicles and increase CDRFI uptake. Risk pools offering climate-related insurance have been operating for several years in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. All have benefitted from donor capitalisation and subsidisation of premiums in the past. With growing climate risks across all these regions; limited fiscal space in low- and middle-income countries; and an overburdened humanitarian caseload, there is increasing interest in using donor subsidies to grow the risk pools and offer more reliable, costeffective and faster support to disaster-affected communities. The IGP has been leading work to identify global standards and best practice in relation to premium subsidies, to help inform a likely increase in this kind of donor support. This report investigates the political economy of countrylevel decision-making in relation to sovereign-level CDRFI, and the role of premium and capital support in these decisions. It also analyses the political economy of donor decisions in relation to PCS. The analysis shows that affordability emerged as the main barrier to insurance uptake, followed by a lack of understanding and technical capacity; availability of alternatives; and perceptions of reliability, among others. Further, the report covers premium subsidies, investigating how these can shape governments’ incentives to purchase insurance as well as considering how the allocation and design of subsidies can affect their impact and effectiveness.

There is growing interest in proactive, risk-informed humanitarian action to provide more timely, efficient and dignified assistance to communities at risk of crises. Calls to scale up such approaches have emphasised the inadequacy of the current levels of funding for anticipatory action and pre-arranged crisis finance and the importance of setting targets against which to measure progress. Yet, there remains significant variation amongst such targets, and in terms of what constitutes a realistic ambition. We need to reassess within the crises that receive international assistance, what opportunities are available to put in place plans, financing, and where possible implement mitigation actions ahead of the events themselves. The challenge for the humanitarian community is to harness existing science and technology to allow us predict and prepare ahead of escalating crisis risks, whilst also retaining the capacities to respond to highly complex, interconnected and/or unprecedented events. This paper intends to provide a clearer framework for understanding what can be anticipated, and to what degree. The analysis in this report shows that there are significant avenues within the humanitarian caseload to take advantage of the existing operational risk information systems as well as the wider potential for crisis risks not yet served by current operational systems. Additionally, the report recognises that there are limits to the degree that crises can be predicted and funding can be pre-arranged. This reinforces the need for anticipatory action and disaster risk financing measures to be complemented by other response mechanisms during and after a crisis situation and for responses to be tailored to individual crises and contexts.