Insuring Against Climate Change

This book provides one of the first systematic in-depth studies on regional catastrophe risk pools. It explores the various goals of these new financial instruments, illustrating how they function on a conceptual, technical and practical level, and reconstructs their political genesis.

With climate-related disasters increasing in frequency and severity, Insuring Against Climate Change explores how affected countries, especially those in the Global South, have increasingly turned to innovative index insurance instruments, as demonstrated by the creation of the Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), the African Risk Capacity (ARC) and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative Facility (PCRAFI Facility). Scherer scrutinizes the formation of this trend, exploring comparatively the goals, characteristics and histories of these tools, and argues that their attractiveness rests more on political than economic benefits and is, in fact, more supply than demand-driven.

Making a significant contribution to current debates on the opportunities and limitations of what are sometimes described as indirect ‘climate risk insurance’, this book will be of great interest to political scientists with an interest in insurance instruments and climate-related disaster management politics as well as to practitioners working in the insurance, finance and the development sectors.

Nikolas Scherer is an advisor at the German Red Cross. Before joining the Red Cross, he was Project Manager at Adelphi, a climate and development policy think tank in Berlin, and research associate at the Hertie School of Governance, Germany. His research interests are disaster risk financing, anticipatory humanitarian action, disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. Scherer holds a PhD in governance from the Hertie School of Governance and a Master’s degree in international relations from the University of Warwick, UK.