InsuResilience Sectoral Community on Nature-based Solutions and Risk Financing: Workshop on “Quantifying benefits of Nature-based solutions”

In late 2020, the InsuResilience Integrated Approaches Working Group launched four sectoral communities (SC) to increase the deep-dive into topic-specific discussions. One of them focuses on linking Nature- based Solutions (NbS) and risk transfer instruments. Overall, this sectoral community seeks to share knowledge on NbS and Risk Financing, help explore and test new risk financing solutions and identify ways to further mainstream NbS and Risk Financing into global climate change adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction agendas.

The SC conducted a survey of how insurers employ NbS. The survey also indicated a lack of agreed assessment tools for the NbS benefits, with a majority of insurers relying on pilot studies rather than widely accepted methodologies. The SC agreed to host a workshop on March 2022 to explore this further and discuss how NbS can be better integrated in catastrophe models and insurance pricing to account for changing protection levels. The workshop was a key milestone for the SC and marked the transition from initial scoping (phase 1) to solution-oriented collaboration (phase 2).