01.06.2022

InsuResilience Global Partnership concluded its events in UNDRR Global Platform 2022

The seventh Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction 2022 (GP2022) took place from 23 May to 28 May in Bali, Indonesia.

The global forum is an avenue to share knowledge and discuss the latest developments and trends within the disaster risk reduction community across the globe. The theme for this year was: From Risk to Resilience: Towards Sustainable Development for All in a COVID-19 Transformed World, which consisted of three main sub-themes: Disaster Risk Governance, COVID-19 recovery and DRR financing.

The InsuResilience Global Partnership (IGP) was delighted to be involved in three events relating to Disaster Risk Governance and DRR financing.

1. Side Event on enhancing the Global Disaster Risk Finance Architecture

IGP hosted a virtual side event titled ‘Toward greater financial resilience: enhancing the Global Disaster Risk Finance Architecture’ on 25 May 2022.

Under the moderation of our Head of the InsuResilience Secretariat, Dr. Astrid Zwick, the panel included experts from various stakeholder groups so as to present different perspectives on enhancing disaster risk financing.

  • Paola Alvarez, Assistant Secretary, Department of Finance, the Republic of the Philippines
  • Jorge Gastelumendi, Director at the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at the Atlantic Council, and the UN Race to Resilience
  • Dr. Heike Henn, Director for Climate, Energy and Environment at Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
  • Gernot Laganda, Chief / Climate and Disaster Risk Reduction Programmes at World Food Programme
  • Vositha Wijenayake, Executive Director, SLYCAN Trust

Dr. Heike Henn opened the session with an introduction on Germany’s vision: Working towards a Global Shield against Climate Risks – the setting up of a systematic, coherent and sustained Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI) Architecture.

Then, each panelist provided their input on why pre-arranged risk finance is important, the relevance to their respective sector, and aligned understanding and the urgency of the enhancement of CDRFI. The discussion ended with key drivers and ingredients to make scaling up CDRFI possible.

The side event also received a lot of active engagement through the Q&A section. We were excited to see such topic gaining so much reaction from the participants.

We echoed with our panelists that close collaboration among key actors with flexible approach is much needed as ‘one size does not fit all’ when it comes to CDRFI. Consolidating all these inputs, IGP will continue our work to build up the Global Shield against Climate Risks.

You can now watch this side event below.

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2. High-Level Dialogue on Strengthening Disaster & Climate Risk Governance at National & Local Levels for Accelerated Progress on SDGs

This high-level dialogue discussed how to overcome persistent challenges and leverage the learnings and opportunities of the COVID-19 recovery and ‘building back better’ for strengthening the integrated governance of systemic risk.

IGP is glad to see that Global Shield is igniting conversations in this dialogue as well. Jochen Steinhilber, Director General for Displacement, Crisis Prevention and Civil Society, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany mentioned the aim of the Global Shield: fostering more coherence, systemic and financial protection against climate and disaster risk.

UNDRR GPDRR2022

 

3. Implementing Nature-based Solutions to Reduce Systemic Risk

On this thematic session, IGP worked with Karina Whalley, Head of Public Sector, AXA Climate to look at how insurance sector can play a vital role in harnessing the benefits from nature-based solutions.

Karina shared that scaling up good practices requires three key ingredients, one of which is financing at scale and insurance itself could help unlock financing.

The theory is that having Eco-DRR in place would make insurance premium cheaper and this “saved” cost could flow into investing in more adaptation. Public private funding structures are also needed to reach real scale. Blended finance can be very catalytic in unlocking the huge amounts of private sector funding available.

The financial sector needs to be brought up to speed on the benefits of nature and the risks of nature loss. While climate seems to be quite mainstreamed, nature is just beginning to become a criterion.