PLEA Network

24 March 2016, EurekAlert, Insurance for an uncertain climate. In December, negotiators at the Paris climate meeting adopted insurance as an instrument to aid climate adaptation. Earlier in the year, the leaders of the G7 pledged to bring climate insurance to 400 million uninsured individuals in poor countries by 2020. In a new article in the journal Nature Climate Change, experts from the London School of Economics and Political Science, Deltares and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis welcome these developments, but also lay out the difficulties that policymakers will face in turning the ideas into action. They warn that ill-designed and poorly implemented insurance instruments could fail to reach the goals of negotiators, or worse, prove detrimental to the very people they are intended to protect. Swenja Surminski, Senior Research Fellow the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science led the article. She says, “Poor communities are much more impacted by extreme weather such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves. Rather than ad-hoc and unpredictable payments after these events, insurance approaches can be set up in advance of these impacts, and be more efficient and provide better support to these vulnerable people.” Bayer was one of the first to propose insurance as a mechanism to reimburse people for the impacts of climate change, and to examine the potential benefits and trade-offs of such policies. She says, “With the new momentum we have for these policies, we now have the opportunity to put the right insurance systems in place.” While insurance could provide funding to help people in need, the researchers point out several ways that such mechanisms could fail: Read More here