climate adaptation

Morgan Stanley recently surveyed over 900 institutional investors to understand their current thoughts on sustainable investments. With climate adaptation and resilience growing in prominence as themes, investors cited catastrophe bonds and physical risk insurance contracts among their top picks.

Global reinsurance company Hannover Re sees an opportunity to further develop the integration of resiliency features within catastrophe bonds, having received positive feedback from the market and clients since the transaction for the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association (NCIUA), Executive Board Member Silke Sehm has told Artemis.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Protection (UNDRR) has published details of a proposal for a high-level Disaster Resilience Adaptation Financing (DRAF) structure that features an insurance-linked securities (ILS) vehicle, to support disaster risk insurance coverage and resilience adaptation financing.

Embedding disaster resiliency terms into catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities (ILS) products could potentially unlock billions of dollars in funding for adaptation and risk reduction measures, according to Alissa Legenza, Member of the UNDRR Investor Advisory Board.

The North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association (NCIUA) has become the first catastrophe bond sponsor to benefit from an issuance that has disaster-resilience features integrated in it, with its recent $600 million Cape Lookout Re Ltd. (Series 2025-1) the very first cat bond to include an additional resilience feature.

As the world navigates major challenges, the transitions that are required to do this effectively are going to call on risk capital and the expertise of the global insurance and reinsurance industry, with its capacity, including ILS and alternative sources, seen as a crucial form of financing, according to S&P Global Ratings.

Analysts at Citigroup have highlighted a growing financing gap in climate adaptation efforts, saying that as this gap grows and steps to mitigate climate change remain at a pace considered too slow, there will be a need for increasing amounts of capital and catastrophe bonds are a useful structure that can be used in support.

With the G7 meeting in Cornwall, UK beginning tomorrow and the COP26 only five months away, CEO’s of major global corporations are calling on world leaders to scale up climate risk transfer as part of the financial response to climate change.

United Nations (UN) Secretary General António Guterres has again said that the world needs more catastrophe-triggered financing and better instruments to support the delivery of climate financing, to enhance disaster resilience, fund adaptation measures and finance climate risk.

Driving home the importance of climate risk mitigation, resilience building and also the role of insurance or reinsurance in providing climate risk transfer, global reinsurer Swiss Re warns that the world’s economy risks a significant hit as the climate changes.