InsuResilience launches roadmap to scale up climate insurance solutions
The InsuResilience Global Partnership has formally launched its Strategic Evidence Roadmap at the COP26 talks in Glasgow, which is aiming to grow the reach and effectiveness of insurance and risk financing solutions as a disaster management tool.
The roadmap is aiming to collect evidence around what works in climate and disaster risk finance and insurance as part of a drive to unlock the potential that insurance can bring for those exposed to natural disasters in vulnerable countries.
Swenja Surminski, chair of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, which worked on the roadmap, said a key objective was to ensure any solutions developed are not “quick fixes that will fail at the first hurdle”.
“We need to learn what works and what doesn’t work,” she said. “We are seeing a real push for innovation.
“There are a number of initiatives and new schemes being developed and finally there is a lot of capital available to develop tools that include insurance and disaster risk financing.
“This creates an obligation to think about scale and the types of products and whether they work.”
The roadmap builds on the InsuResilience Global Partnership’s Vision 2025, launched six years ago, which set a series of targets to reach poor and vulnerable people with risk finance and insurance by the middle of the decade.
Maria Flachsbarth, parliamentary state secretary to the German federal minister for economic cooperation and development, said the roadmap sets out an implementation framework and highlights the need for joint action.
“Today’s launch marks a major milestone but this is not the end of the journey - it is a starting point. The road still lies ahead of us and implementation will be critical. Actors need to step up and take leading roles in the implementation process.”
Surminski and Flachsbarth were speaking at a panel discussion in Glasgow hosted by Rowan Douglas, who heads up the climate and resilience hub at Willis Towers Watson.