By Claire Stam
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“No degree of global warming is safe. Even at one degree (of warming) we’re seeing consequences for people, nature and livelihoods,” said Debra Roberts, who co-chaired the landmark 1.5°C report released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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Commenting on financing, Michael Szöny of Zurich Insurance, underlined the cost efficiency of investing in prevention. “Beyond humanitarian life savings, and making lives more livable, there is an economic case that is if you invest early, you need less money to provide response relief and recovery,” he told EURACTIV.
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“As it is, if you are looking at where the money is going, only 13% of spending goes into pre-event resilience and risk reduction, meaning that 87% goes into post-event relief,” he stressed.
And the figures are even worse when looking at overseas development aid. “Only 40 cents out of a $100 of development money overall goes into risk-informed development,” he said. “So we have an economic case here, but what we see is that in reality the money is going somewhere else,” Michael Szöny noted, underlining the necessity to reverse that trend.
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Presently, development money is divided into three different flows: climate finance, development financing, and risk financing. “They should not be separate because that means you are effectively spending development money three times,” Szöny said. “So you need to mainstream these three flows and make your investment more clever,” he stressed.
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