Cities are often at the frontline of response to climate-related hazards because of their geography, often located in low-lying coastal areas, and their concentration of population, infrastructure, and assets. At the same time, the global insurance protection gap is widening, driving calls for enhanced investments in climate-risk protection. In cities, the risk of climate hazards is layered on top of diverse social and economic dynamics that unevenly spread the impact of shocks or stressors. However, cities can play a key role in closing the climate protection gap by acting as insurance consumers and funding risk reduction, as stewards of risk-reduction and management through climate adaptation policy and planning, as well as promoters of knowledge about risk and insurance provision within the urban ecosystem. Focused on developing incentives for risk reducing behaviour at the community level, understanding risks and vulnerabilities can help direct investments into building resilience for the most vulnerable, and enhance local governments understanding of its impact on the broader landscape of risk management plans.

Insurance can increase risk awareness, provide incentives for risk mitigation, and support economic growth and capital mobilisation, but without understanding the full extent of climate-related hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities at the community level, just transformative for climate adaptation and risk prevention will remain a challenge. In a recent survey of 812 cities by CDP, nearly half of the cities surveyed have not undertaken a climate risk and vulnerability assessment, demonstrating a lack of knowledge regarding climate hazard risk to public and private assets, lives, and livelihoods (CDP, 2020). Enhancing cities’ investments and technical capacities in developing climate-informed risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses is a key for formulating their climate adaptation plans, and further integrating resilience building into the city’s wider strategic planning. This can also strengthen the fiscal capacity of cities and enhance their creditworthiness, which in turn help create the enabling environment for insurance provision and resilient infrastructure investment.

Hazard and vulnerability assessments can unlock access to funds to support climate resilience. This session aims to highlight the impact of community based urban resilience assessments in developing impactful inclusive solutions for climate adaptation. The first panel will explore the IFRC experience in applying Z Zurich Foundation Climate Resilience Measurement for Communities (CRMC) framework. The panel will also shed the light on key lessons learned from the Council of Europe Development Bank in support of the Super Block Programme – Resilience Monitoring Indicators, that helped shape climate adaptation short- and long-term intervention plans for the city of Barcelona, as well as hearing from the city council the challenges and opportunities they faced in understanding climate vulnerabilities at the local level, and efforts for directing investments towards mitigating risks impact in the urban context. Using data for Early Warning Systems, the Municipality of Matosinhos will tell us more about their 10-year “Zero Fires” strategy to prevent forest fires, and how vulnerability assessments can help guide the decision making for Resilience building investments in Early Warning.

As Cities play an important role in convening or elevating a variety of stakeholders from public and private sectors that can speak to diverse risks and needs in each community, in the second panel of this session, we will get to learn more about the Tripartite Agreement Programme, and the UNDP approach in leveraging financing, expertise and risk capital for the fulfilment of Vision 2025 through public-private partnership. Aimed at preventing disaster from turning into a crisis, we will get to learn more from Howden Climate Risk & Resilience about Parametric Insurance, and how it can be used as a tool to transfer risk and build resilience for the most vulnerable.

Providing community-based resilience assessments can help insurers more accurately inform risk insurance decision making processes, and cities developing their Resilience Action Plans. This will be further explored through the experience of the Hague, as part of their engagement in the Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship, and how this is directly tied to risk assessments in identifying ways that insurance can be used as a tool for building resilience, and prioritizing risks for adaptation solutions. Aligned with the UNDRR MCR2030 Initiative global efforts on building Resilience Hubs capacities on climate risk assessments and resilience sustainable financing, this panel will open the door to learn the Regional Coordinating Committees (RCC) Thematic Semester on Risk Financing, and its efforts to engage with the Academia, local governments, private sector, Regional and International key financial actors to present integrated resilience solutions and policy impacts, that can help drive investments towards urban resilience financing at cities and communities’ level.

This session is part of the The governance of the new crises: managing and funding resilience in Europe stream.