Insurance for more resilient cities
The Insurance Industry and Cities Summit - the first of its kind - was a key event at the 8th Global Forum on urban Resilience & Adaptation, held on 4 - 6 May 2017 in Bonn, Germany. The event was co-organized by the UN Environment’s Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI) Initiative and ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability, which joined forces to create the largest collaboration between the insurance industry and cities. Participating risk analysts, insurers and development officials showed how the industry sector can help cities assess their exposure to climate adverse events and development traps and build their resilience. Local leaders brought in the perspective of the most vulnerable and the need to build capacity and even literacy within exposed communities.
Developing city level sustainable insurance. As risk managers, insurers can help communities understand, prevent and reduce risk through risk research and analytics, catastrophe risk models, and loss prevention. Catastrophe risk modelling firms, today, are able to develop sophisticated tools used by insurers and re-insurers to assess risks, by creating synthetic histories of specific areas, going back up to 100,000 years. They can also model climate change costs going onward in time. Innovative insurance solutions- such as catastrophe bonds, social-interest bonds, and resilience bonds- are in the works or in the first phases of implementation.
Resilient Cities was first launched in 2010 as a global platform for urban resilience and climate change adaptation. The almost 50 sessions of the Resilient Cities 2017 conference had one clear common thread: the need to build coalitions and partnerships at all levels to face present and future growing challenges from climate change and unsustainable urbanization. To catalyse the uptake of such coalitions, the ‘Bonn Ambition Declaration’, at the close of the summit, identified three main goals for next year: (i) to develop city level sustainable insurance roadmaps; (ii) to transform the 10 targets of Sustainable Development Goal 11 into a set of insurance development goals; and (iii) to organize the first ever Mayor and Insurance CEO meeting, possibly at ICLEI World Congress 2018.
Resources: Press Release on "Insurance Development Goals for Cities” | Updates from the first day, the second day, and the third day of the Resilient Cities 2017 congress | "Collaborating for resilience" research series by the UNEP FI Principles for Sustainable Insurance Initiative.