world bank

The World Bank is working with four countries from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Commission (OECS), Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, to strengthen their climate resilience and with three risk transfer options being explored, a catastrophe swap, catastrophe bonds, or securing more parametric insurance.

According to executives at the World Bank, artificial intelligence (AI) based improvements to catastrophe risk modelling could in future allow more transactions to be brought to the catastrophe bond market, with less lead time and potentially wider investor acceptance.

The World Bank has approved the Regional Emergency Preparedness and Inclusive Recovery Program (REPAIR), which is designed to boost financial resilience against climate shocks for Eastern and Southern African countries and leverages private market parametric disaster insurance risk transfer alongside its contingent credit DDO solution.

The World Bank is reportedly aiming to issue its first drought catastrophe bond over the next 12 – 18 months, which would most likely be focused on Africa, George Richardson, director of the capital markets and investment department at the World Bank Treasury, told Reuters.

The World Bank has now facilitated and issued over US $4.8 billion in catastrophe bonds across 17 transactions we have covered over the years, with $745 million issued over the course of just a few weeks in 2024 to support Mexico and Jamaica’s disaster risk transfer and financing needs.

Leaders of 10 multilateral development banks (MDB’s) announced steps to collaborate more effectively to increase the impact and scale of their work, in order to tackle urgent development challenges, including addressing the growing need for disaster risk insurance and in climate risk financing.

Jamaica is looking to renew its catastrophe bond cover that expired at the end of 2023 and the country’s Finance Minister Nigel Clarke said yesterday that a longer-term of protection will be sought with a new cat bond deal, with four hurricane seasons of cover to be the target.

The World Bank announced a significant expansion of the use of catastrophe bonds, reinsurance and instruments such as parametric risk transfer for countries exposed to large-scale disasters, with an ambition to embed catastrophe insurance and risk transfer instruments more deeply into its financing operations.

This video features a keynote speech and Q&A with Jorge Familiar, Vice President and Treasurer, of the World Bank Group from our Artemis London 2023 conference, that was held in London on September 5th 2023.

After it was reported that the World Bank targets a significant increase in the use of catastrophe bonds by its client countries, already a number of potential future World Bank cat bond deals are being discussed.