New InsuRisk Report focuses on social protection
Every year on 13 October the United Nations celebrates the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). The General Assembly called for this day to raise awareness of the importance of reducing our risk to disasters. On this year’s DRR Day, UNU-EHS will launch its latest InsuRisk Report: Disaster risk, social protection and readiness for insurance solutions.
The new report includes a global update of the InsuRisk assessment tool, providing information on climate and disaster risk and readiness for insurance solutions for 188 countries. In addition, it includes a thematic discussion of an emerging field which has gained increasing attention during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: social protection in the context of climate and disaster risk.
Environmental and man-made hazards increasingly interact with social and economic change to create risk for ecosystems, infrastructures and society. Solutions to effectively shield people, sectors and systems from the effects of climate change and natural hazards, and support them in their efforts to cope with and recover from disasters if they happen, are therefore a prime concern of the coming decades. The expansion of social protection has a key role to play in this respect, particularly in dynamic societies of emerging economies which frequently experience high vulnerability mixed with changing attitudes and resources towards risk reduction.
The report provides an overview of the current state of social protection, discusses the linkages between social protection and climate and disaster risk, and sheds light on social protection in the broader realm of risk financing and insurance.
“The report sheds light on the linkages between risk, social protection, and insurance solutions,” said Dominic Sett, lead author of the report. “It thereby presents avenues for combining these tools in a way that they re-enforce one another to help us manage the increasingly complex risks that we observe globally.”
“Our analysis also shows that readiness for insurance solutions is particularly low in the most vulnerable countries” added Dr. Michael Hagenlocher, who leads the InsuRisk project. “The report can hence also be understood as a clear call for action to strengthen readiness in these countries, given that this is where insurance solutions are needed the most.”
The report was written in collaboration with the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII), Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (LMU), the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, and the InsuResilience Global Partnership (IGP). The last edition of the InsuRisk Assessment Tool was published in 2020 with a focus on Small Island Developing States.
You will be able to view the report here on 13 October.