Marsh McLennan (MMC) has entered into a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock) to help mobilise the insurance and reinsurance sectors in support of the UN’s Race to Resilience campaign for climate resilience.
The partnership will seek to showcase innovative disaster risk reduction initiatives that move communities from a reliance on recovery to focusing on resilience, MMC explained.
The campaign features 17 projects which are viewed as redefining the role of insurance in global disaster planning.
MMC’s businesses and Arsht-Rock are directly involved in several of these projects, including a pilot for a community-based catastrophe insurance model for vulnerable populations in New York City, a blended capital funding structure in Santiago, Chile, and integrated disaster risk reduction and microinsurance programs in Mexico and India.
This initiative will launch at COP 27 on November 10th, following which the parties and other supporters will enter dialogue with re/insurers globally to seek their participation in scaling these projects and engage on potential approaches to accelerate the sector’s impact on these issues.
“Through this initiative, we are showcasing the world’s most innovative and impactful insurance-based climate adaptation projects and applying a simple and clear framework for industry engagement,” said Mahmoud Mohieldin, UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for Egypt, COP27.
“Our aim is to scale amongst others, the (re)insurance sector’s impact on climate adaptation and facilitate engagement with projects in need of support,” he added.
Julian Enoizi, Global Head of Public Sector Risk Solutions, Guy Carpenter, a business of MMC, also commented: “We are proud to be engaged in this work today, partnering with government and insurers to build public-private partnerships that help communities build resilience to climate change. Through effective financial investments and targeted on-the-ground interventions, the global insurance industry can help increase our resilience to a hotter, more volatile planet.”
Kathy Baughman McLeod, Senior VP and Director, Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Resilience Center, further stated: “We know that a dollar invested in disaster preparation and prevention saves up to eleven dollars in response funding. Ironically, 88 percent of all disaster relief comes after the catastrophe. Imagine the human pain and economic loss that we could prevent if we could reverse this model.”
