Port Vila
Vanuatu

Understanding Risk Finance Pacific 2018

Organizer(s) World Bank, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, the (GFDRR)
Date
-

Event Summary

Understanding Risk Finance Pacific (URf Pacific) is envisioned as the premier regional forum for Pacific Island Countries that brings together policy-makers, financial risk managers and development partners to strengthen regional collaboration on climate and disaster risk finance. URf Pacific provides a forum to share lessons on communicating risk to technical and policy audiences, and offers learning opportunities across five core themes that are integral to financial resilience.

To cultivate new partnerships, broad participation is anticipated from both public and private sectors, including catastrophe risk pools from other regions, the international insurance sector, and technical practitioners from interrelated development areas: disaster risk reduction, emergency response and recovery, urban planning, climate change adaptation, and social protection.

Objectives

  • Foster new opportunities for knowledge exchange across countries and regional risk pooling facilities to accelerate learning and capture best practices on DRFI in PICs
  • Increase awareness of national and regional initiatives to identify areas of collaboration and cross-support
  • Offer technical training on DRF-related topics, and experiential learning to solve current challenges for decision makers in PICs

Core Themes

  • Disaster Risk Assessment
  • Catastrophe Risk Insurance
  • Quantitative Risk Information
  • Public Financial Management
  • Disaster Risk Reduction

Where it all began

Finance ministers from Pacific Island Countries (PICs) have identified Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (DRFI) as a regional priority towards building financial resilience to climate and disaster risks. Over the past decade, concerted efforts to improve the fiscal capacity of governments to respond to climate and seismic-related events were made by government leaders, regional agencies and development partners, including the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative (PCRAFI) that began in 2007. As a result, greater access to disaster risk information translates to a better understanding of risk finance in the Pacific, and ultimately, the design of financial protection strategies for PICs that mitigate fiscal impacts from natural disasters.

Launched in 2016, the PCRAFI Program – Phase II: Furthering Disaster Risk Finance in the Pacific scales-up regional efforts among regional organizations, ministries of finance, donor partners and the World Bank Group to strengthen the financial resilience of PICs. The five-year regional collaboration focuses on implementing a technical assistance program and establishing a regional catastrophe risk insurance platform – the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Insurance Company (PCRIC). Knowledge Management and Learning (KML) is one of the key pillars of the PCRAFI Program to showcase national and regional experiences, and global best practices, are continually integrated to improve implementation.

Forum Design

The multi-day conference and training will include plenary and breakout sessions, including two parallel tracks for policy and technical audiences. The session design and content will be crowdsourced from countries, partners and the community to offer participants a spectrum of dynamic learning experiences, panels, round-table discussions, hands-on trainings, simulated decision-making, among others.

About the PCRAFI Program

The PCRAFI Program – Phase II: Furthering Disaster Risk Finance in the Pacific – scales-up regional collaboration to increase the financial resilience of Pacific Island Countries (PICs) against natural hazards and their capacity to meet post-disaster funding needs. In 2016, more than US$40 million in grants was mobilized for PICs through the G7 initiative on climate risk insurance, InsuResilience Global Partnership, to establish the PCRAFI Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) with generous contributions from Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The five-year program is implemented in collaboration with regional development agencies, the Pacific Community (SPC) and the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), and the Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program (DRFIP) – a partnership between the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the World Bank Group’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice.

To learn more: https://www.financialprotectionforum.org/urfp-vanuatu-2018.

If you have any questions, please contact: Bradley Lyon, Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program (DFRIP), World Bank

Explore further

Country and region Vanuatu Oceania
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