Statement delivered by Ms. Ekhosuehi Iyahen, Secretary General, Insurance Development Forum

V20 MINISTERIAL DIALOGUE VIII- 21 April, 2022

 Statements

10:00 pm Dhaka time/12:00 pm Washington DC time

Statement delivered by Ms. Ekhosuehi Iyahen, Secretary General, Insurance Development Forum

Ms. Ekhosuehi Iyahen

Secretary General, Insurance Development Forum

Excellencies and distinguished representatives, thank you for the opportunity to update you on an important initiative to accelerate risk understanding for public good, known as the Global Risk Modeling Alliance (GRMA). My intervention will only last about three minutes, but it describes an important opportunity for climate vulnerable countries and also concludes with a request. You may remember that the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), which I represent, is a public-private partnership launched by the United Nations led by the insurance industry and supported by many international organizations.

Our mission is to optimize and extend the use of insurance and related risk management capabilities to build greater resilience and protection for people, communities, businesses and public institutions that are vulnerable to disasters and their associated economic shocks.

Excellencies, I think that we are all aware that climate and disaster risk understanding is an indispensible foundation for sovereign risk strategies that include resilient investment, transfer of residual risk to markets, and disaster risk response programs that protect our citizens. At the 1st Climate Vulnerable Finance Summit last year, I had the privilege of speaking to you not only about the protection gap, but what I consider to be a risk understanding and management gap, which needs and must be addressed. We know this gap is not through lack of efforts or desire for local risk understanding in climate vulnerable countries. But because even now, access to risk science, data and modelling knowledge is unequal and is often locked up behind financial and systemic barriers. We now have a specific solution to removing these barriers and helping sovereigns to build autonomous local capability.

The Global Risk Modeling Alliance (GRMA) is a new freely accessible service jointly offered by the InsuResilience Program and Insurance Development Forum in partnership with the V20. Your response to this idea has been remarkable. Your commitments to public private partnership in risk and resilience understanding was formalized in the V20 – Insurance Development Forum Agreement, which we signed during COP26 in November. This, in return, led to the German government’s confirmation just two weeks later of 11 million euros in funding to support the first 46 countries visioned to use this groundbreaking service. The program is now a reality and will be formally launched at the IDF summit in June this year.

The GRMA offers a powerful combination of significant funding for new models, open source technology and the support of expert practitioners. Moreover, it aims to build a global community of risk knowledge.

Working side by side with the GRMA in a core developed program, the officials will be able to build a strategic risk assessment followed by practical applied risk finance projects and improved local capability in analysis for risk management and climate risk finance, with access to open tools and the knowledge gained through practical experience. I stress that the program is designed to fulfill the public good objectives and supports the InsuResilience Global Partnerships’ Vision 2025. However, it can only work if there is interest and commitment from the sovereign governments and cities to work together in co-developing risk programs to grow sovereign capability in the long term, which brings me to my request. If you, or your partner Ministries, have an interest in developing sovereign risk analytics capability for whatever strategic or operational risk reasons, we would love to hear from you. Our GRMA team is available to work in partnership with you and the V20 Secretariat even just for exploratory conversations. We believe that enabling locally relevant risk analysis at the point where the hard decisions have to be made is a very powerful step forward in risk management and unlocking risk financing.

I look forward to discussing this with any ministries that may be interested in learning more and to consolidating this very promising partnership. I thank you.

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