The InsuResilience Global Partnership (IGP) was initiated in 2017 at COP23 by the G20 and V20 countries. The IGP focuses on financial and insurance solutions for climate and disaster risks. Its core objective is to increase the resilience of the poorest and most vulnerable people and protect them against losses. It is thus intended to contribute toward management and transfer of climate risks. The InsuResilience Initiative, launched in 2015 under the German G7 presidency, is the predecessor to the InsuResilience Global Partnership.
Objectives
The concrete goal of the InsuResilience Initiative is to reach 400 million additional vulnerable people by 2020; the IGP increased this goal to 500 million people by 2025. To this end, the initiative is concentrating on promoting existing insurance solutions, both direct and indirect. In the area of indirect insurance, the main focus is on supporting the African Risk Capacity (ARC), the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative (PCRAFI). The implementation of the initiative is mainly coordinated by the InsuResilience Secretariat, which is based at the German Association for International Cooperation (GIZ) in Germany.
Key developments
At COP21 in Paris in December 2015, the G7 states reaffirmed their support for the initiative and pledged a total of $422 million. One year later at COP22 in Marrakech, the group of supporters was expanded to include the Netherlands and the EU. In addition, the World Bank has been assigned a role and the UN World Food Programme and the Insurance Development Forum (IDF) have also become associated partners of the initiative. In the course of this, total funding increased to approximately $550 million.
Further progress was made in developing climate risk insurance instruments and additional climate risk finance during the German G20 presidency in 2017. Building on the InsuResilience Initiative, the G20 countries welcomed a new partnership as part of their Climate and Energy Action Plan. This partnership was then officially launched within the framework of COP23 as the InsuResilience Global Partnership for Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance Solutions, expanded to include the V20 countries. With its wider scope of action, this partnership goes beyond supporting insurance instruments. It aims to increase the resilience of developing countries and protect poor people in particular from the consequences of catastrophes and, among other things, provide solutions for the design of concrete risk financing and insurance solutions. The supported instruments range from governmental risk pools to insurance systems that focus on the meso and micro levels. Germany and the UK pledged a total of approximately $165 million to the partnership.
Various programs have been set up within the partnership, such as the InsuResilience Solutions Fund (ISF), which was announced in November 2017 and is intended to support the development of innovative and market-ready climate risk insurance products for developing and emerging countries. In addition to the €15 million from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), contributions have also come from the private sector.
In October 2018, Germany established a new financing instrument together with the United Kingdom and the World Bank, the Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF). With the $145 million pledged at the time of its foundation, it is designed to make a key contribution to the implementation of the InsuResilience Global Partnership.
In December 2019, the establishment of the Natural Disasters Fund (NDF) Deutschland was announced at COP25. It is intended to secure the capacity of aid organizations and other institutions in developing countries to respond to extreme weather events. The BMZ pledged $25 million to the fund.
Funding volume and Germany’s contribution
As the holder of the G7 presidency, the German government was a driving force behind the establishment of the InsuResilience Initiative. In 2015 it pledged $150 million, and another $40 million in 2016. Since 2015, the German contribution to financing within the framework of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, including the period of the pure G7 initiative, amounted to €450 million (70 percent of the funds provided). (March 2020)
