07.12.2018

The Need for Intergrated Approaches to Climate Risk Management

“Insurance is not a silver bullet.” This statement has been emphasized several times in the context of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, including by its founding members. Risk transfer solutions do promote resilience-building, for example, through more timely and reliable disaster response, improved risk awareness and risk modelling capacities, and to some extent risk reduction efforts. However, linkages between risk transfer and other pillars of climate risk management have not yet been fully captured. Integrated solutions that couple financial mechanisms with other resilience measures is an emerging field which shows potential to create long-term resilience benefits beyond financial protection.

The Partnership launches a working group

The InsuResilience Global Partnership states in its Concept Note that its role is to “promote and enable the adoption of disaster risk financing and insurance approaches as part of comprehensive disaster risk management strategies, integrated within preparedness, response recovery plans.” On this front, and driven by demand of its members, the Partnership launched a working group titled “Integrated Resilience Approaches” in July 2018.

Within an ongoing dialogue, the working group has been working towards its goal to embed climate and disaster risk finance and insurance within comprehensive risk management by further developing and promoting scalable solutions that link wider climate adaptation and risk management efforts with financial resilience. Such solutions could help overcome the “either/or” trade-offs which are often faced by decision-making authorities in deciding between allocating limited disaster risk management funding to investments in risk reduction, preparedness or into risk transfer mechanisms. As part of this effort, the working group aims to disseminate knowledge on existing and emerging integrated solutions to climate and disaster risk management so as to help vulnerable communities and individuals to improve their resilience-building strategies.

Workshop ideas in London

The working group, which consists of members from 21 different partner organisations, with representatives from international organisations, governmental agencies, the private sector, civil society and academia, recently held a workshop in London to consolidate the group’s to-date outputs. At the workshop, working group members met to present and further develop several key items. These items included the development of an reference model for classifying and mapping integrated solutions, a guiding set of criteria to assess the feasibility and impact potential of such solutions, and a cataloguing of existing and emerging solutions. Representatives of the working group will be sharing these learnings and outcomes in the coming week at the InsuResilience Global Partnership Forum on December 10th.