NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Join our discussions next month in Dhaka, Bangladesh as leaders from the public and private sector put their heads together to take action by developing insurance solutions to increase the resilience of low-income households in Asia, who are among the most vulnerable to climate and disaster risk in the world.

Bangladesh – host country of the 17th Consultative Forum on 4 November 2019, to be held alongside the 15th International Conference on Inclusive Insurance (15th IMC) – is acutely exposed to tropical cyclones. In 2017 Cyclone Mora displaced half a million people in coastal areas and damaged 20,000 homes in refugee camps. Low-lying Pacific islands such as Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Vanuatu have already witnessed the first exodus of climate refugees.

Against this background, the 17th Consultative Forum will bring together insurance companies, digital providers, policymakers and regulators to discuss how to reduce the protection gap – the difference between insured and uninsured economic losses – in climate risk and natural catastrophe insurance. Jointly organised by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS), Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii), Microinsurance Network (MiN) and InsuResilience Global Partnership, and hosted by the Bangladesh Insurance Association (BIA) and Munich Re Foundation, the Consultative Forum aims to answer one crucial question: What are the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder to reduce the protection gap in climate risk/nat cat insurance and what are the urgent steps that they have to adopt to make this happen?

The 17th Consultative Forum is a must-attend event for insurance regulators and supervisors, policymakers, insurers, reinsurers, brokers, climate change experts, aggregators, and international development professionals. Key themes include: why does the protection gap exist and why does it matter?; what barriers do both the private and the public sectors need to overcome to build the resilience of vulnerable households and small businesses?; which innovative approaches have been addressing vulnerability to climate change and building resilience to shocks at scale?; and how can sovereign insurance and microinsurance reinforce and not undermine one another?