Scaling Up: COP26 presents opportunity to highlight risk-pooling structures

Existing risk pooling structures can help highlight to policymakers the value of insurance-based mechanisms as a disaster risk reduction tool, according to Bronwyn Claire, senior programme manager at ClimateWise.

Claire, co-author of a report released this week by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership (CISL) which called for a significant expansion in the availability of risk-sharing pools to address the climate emergency.

Claire told The Insurer TV that existing structures serve as an example of the skills insurance mechanisms can bring to climate risk management. 

“These structures are a great avenue to promote how a more proactive approach, and understanding of the skills insurance can bring, when finance and environment ministers are meeting at COP26,” she said.

Claire said a mixture of microinsurance and other community-based options could provide solutions at a local level, while insurance can also play a role at the sovereign level.  

In addition, she said tax-based solutions can help spread risk-sharing opportunities so that it does not just sit with the insurance sector.

Dominic Christian, global chairman at Aon’s Reinsurance Solutions and chair of ClimateWise, said there were already several examples of existing pooling frameworks that could serve as templates for future initiatives.

“The India crop scheme is particularly interesting, as around 70 percent of the population is in some way connected to it,” he said. 

“Africa Risk Capacity is another very interesting arrangement, where 35 African Union member states are acting together. It has shown its value where payments have been made to communities in Senegal, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

“In the Caribbean, CCRIF has been a very useful arrangement for the members of the scheme.

“We do some really good things already, we just need to do much more of them. The question is how we bring them to greater scale and how we provide much greater capacity, which is where we perhaps consider integrated financing with other business communities.”