Howden at COP28
A group from our Climate Risk and Resilience team, led by our CEO David Howden, attended COP28 in Dubai, UAE, to collaborate, network and demonstrate how insurance plays a vital role in driving climate solutions.
We contributed to important conversations alongside world-leading climate experts at a number of events, including the COP28 Business & Philanthropy Climate Forum and within the Climate Action Innovation Zone, our aim being to accelerate and scale action around:
• empowering vulnerable communities to build financial preparedness against climate disasters;
• connecting the public and private sector to tackle urban resilience challenges;
• enabling and de-risking the transition by deploying insurance tools to help speed and scale the flow of capital.
Watch David Howden's keynote
Watch the keynote speech at COP28 building on the announcement of a ground-breaking piece of research which shifts the focus to protecting whole countries, not just assets and buildings. You can read the research below.
Risk Sharing for Loss and Damage
The report, led by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, offers a compelling solution for the future financial architecture of Loss & Damage, showing that these risks are insurable and proposes a solution using the power of insurance and capital markets to dramatically scale up the impact of L&D funding showing that millions of dollars of premium could be transformed into billions of dollars of financial protection for vulnerable countries across the Global South.
Insurance – the great enabler
The team at COP28 hosted roundtables and spoke on panels about how insurance is an essential ingredient to speed and scale the climate transition and Rowan Douglas, CEO of Climate Risk and Resilience, delivered his keynote on the power of insurance across the energy transition.
Click here to read some insight from Rowan and watch his keynote on the outcomes that revealed that insurance has become an essential ingredient to speed and scale the climate transition.
Tackling urban resilience
We facilitated collaborative dialogue at COP28 around how to improve resilience for vulnerable communities and urban areas across the world.
The Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship (a joint global partnership launched at COP27 by the Sustainable Markets Initiative, Howden and Resilient Cities Network) recently launched the 2023 report.
This details how a cohort of insurance professionals were chosen as Fellows and seconded into city leadership teams around the world. Over three to six months, each Fellow worked with city leaders to deliver tangible movement towards increased city resilience and to harness the power of insurance to de-risk and accelerate resilience-building activities.
Building Preparedness and Protection in Smallholder Agriculture
Smallholder farmers represent over 80 percent of farms worldwide. They are facing more frequent and severe climate shocks, but lack access to the tools required to mitigate them.
This working paper is for a growing community of stakeholders seeking to explore how risk transfer can be incorporated into risk mitigation, resilience-building and market-building measures to support smallholder farmers to grow yields, increase incomes and cope with the natural disasters of today and the future.