climate catastrophe bond

This week, the World Bank Group announced its new Climate Change Action Plan, featuring a range of commitments to ramp up and deliver record levels of climate finance, while catastrophe bonds, disaster risk financing and insurance against climate risk are also mentioned as key elements of the plan.

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.

The deepening of the world’s understanding, measurement and valuation of climate risks is going to drive a massive demand for contingent risk capital, which parametric triggers and insurance-linked securities (ILS) will be well-suited to serve, Rowan Douglas of Willis Towers Watson explained during our ILS NYC event this week.

It is time for the world to act on climate change as it will play an increasing role in disaster losses, Torsten Jeworrek of reinsurance company Munich Re warned today.

The physical climate risk protection gap, so the gulf between climate related losses covered by insurance, reinsurance or risk transfer and those going uncovered, is widening, but instruments such as insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bonds and other blended financing solutions can help to narrow this gap.

A forum co-chaired by UK regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) calls for the development of a market for climate-related insurance-linked securities (ILS) in London.

The European Commission (EC) has launched a consultation on sustainable finance, as it plans to “ensure a sustainable and resilient economic recovery following the coronavirus outbreak.”

The African Risk Capacity (ARC) continues to work towards the implementation of its climate catastrophe bond backed Extreme Climate Facility (XCF), focusing on the development of a robust multi-hazard index that can be used to trigger the instruments.

The African Risk Capacity (ARC) is continuing to make progress towards the launch of its Extreme Climate Facility (XCF), a proposed multi-year funding mechanism that will issue climate change catastrophe bonds to help African nations transfer climate change related exposure to the capital markets.

The African Risk Capacity (ARC) has enlarged its risk pool, adding five new countries to those protected by the parametric insurer, growing the risk pool to $192m of capacity and utilising $70m of global reinsurance cover, which includes some ILS or collateralised protection.