Letters from Sendai no. 3: partnerships and the role of insurance

Swenja Surminski of the London School of Economics wrote the third letter, posted on 17 March 2015. Its theme was multi-sector partnerships and where insurance fits in them.

She noted a strong private-sector presence at the conference and the work of the UNISDR Private Sector Advisory Group. ENHANCE partner Willis hosted forums on the financial system and disaster risk, and Jaroslav Mysiak of the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) spoke at a public forum on flooding in Europe.

One moment stood out. At a Geneva Association public forum on insurance, Margareta Wahlström, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, said she was still unsure how to run an effective dialogue between many stakeholders. Coming from the official in charge of the process, that was a frank admission.

Surminski’s argument ran in three steps:

• expectations of insurance differ widely between stakeholders;
• ENHANCE found no appetite for harmonising insurance approaches across Europe;
• risk layering, which matches different tools to different levels of risk, helps sort out which instrument does which job (citing Mechler et al. in Nature Climate Change, 2014).

She closed on an observation from the corridors. Most of the non-insurers she met did not want cover from the insurance industry so much as its data and its knowledge of risk.

Risk layering and the national approaches it sorts are discussed on the schemes comparison and parametric insurance pages. The following letter dealt with the economics of risk reduction (no. 4).