Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Insurance: Success, Challenges and Opportunities

Both Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) and Climate Risk Finance & Insurance (CRFI) can be used to enhance adaptation, reduce and transfer risk, and build resilience to the growing impacts from natural and human-made hazards. There is a nascent and growing interest in where these strategies may intersect and be mutually beneficial for adaptation.

The substantive engagement between the insurance and environmental sectors is relatively new. Thus, it is hardly surprising that few fully integrated Climate Risk Finance & Insurance and EbA products (e.g. reef insurance in Mexico, p. 24) currently exist, and that such solutions face some challenges. That said, there are many common interests and significant opportunities which could help improve integration of CRFI with EbA and more broadly Nature-based Solutions. These can lead to innovations beneficial to both sectors and, most importantly, to improved resilience outcomes for vulnerable people and for nature.

The GIZ joint publication by the Global Project Mainstreaming EbA, the InsuResilience Secretariat and ACRI+ is available now; Authors: UC Santa Cruz, The Nature Conservancy, Social Impact Partners.