This blog explores how the lack of transparency around the levels of costs and concessionality across different risk finance instruments hinders countries when choosing the most appropriate instruments that best address their crisis protection gaps, and what can be done to address this.

This blog reviews the record payouts from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) after Hurricane Beryl. The blog is part of a new ‘Hurricane Beryl’ blog series, which draws lessons about how pre-arranged financing is evolving to meet the ever-increasing costs of preparing for and responding to future climate shocks.

As the toolkit for pre-arranged financing expands, it is becoming increasingly challenging for governments to determine which instrument, or combination of instruments, best meets their needs. There is no single ‘best’ PAF instrument. This report offers an in-depth assessment of pre-arranged financing tools using seven key criteria for ensuring pre-arranged financing reduces the human and financial costs of disasters.

In an era marked by an increasing frequency and severity of climate-related disasters, the ability to respond swiftly and effectively has never been more critical. The Centre for Disaster Protection’s report, The State of Pre-Arranged Financing for Disasters 2024, offers a detailed analysis of to what extent pre-arranged financing is shaping disaster response across the globe.

Our new insight paper explores the complexities of international premium support and identifies core challenges with current approaches to the allocation and design of premium subsidies. It underscores the pressing need for reform.

A Year in Review is the Centre’s first published annual report. It details our progress and the challenges we’ve encountered, and showcases our impact from July 2023 to June 2024.

Counter Crisis, the three-part podcast series by Centre for Disaster Protection and produced by Tortoise Media, is now available to download in full across the major podcast platforms.

Finance is crucial for containing the spread of the new disease while not leaving countries to raid their national budgets and accumulate unsustainable debt burdens. But we don't need just more money; we need systems that ensure money is timely and reaches the frontline. In Episode 3 of the Centre for Disaster Protection's podcast, Counter Crisis, Cristina Stefan, the Centre’s Lead Risk Finance Advisor, is joined by Ruchir Agarwal, a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, to discuss why the race against the next pandemic has already started.

In Episode II of the Centre for Disaster Protection’s podcast, Counter Crisis, Shakira Mustapha, is joined by Michai Robertson to discuss the latest break-throughs in the global financing architecture dealing with the climate change.

In this inaugural episode of Counter Crisis, Ekhosuehi Iyahen and Lydia Poole discuss the complexities and challenges surrounding global disaster planning and financing. What needs to change to ensure the most vulnerable communities receive the protection they need?

Cristina Stefan, Lead Risk Finance Adviser, and Anna DeGrauw, Policy and Strategic Partnerships Officer, take a look at what the World Bank’s new Crisis Toolkit means for IDA countries, and what it could do to strengthen pre-arranged financing targets, crisis preparedness and partnerships.

In a new three-part podcast series, the Counter Crisis, experts discuss the state of pre-arranged financing for disasters, how we can prevent climate-related disasters from devastating the lives of the most vulnerable, and how to be ready for the next pandemic.

After the compounding crises of the past few years, political leaders and publics are understandably keen to put pandemics in the rearview mirror and focus on other issues. Yet the evidence is blinking red that delaying action to improve pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response will only increase the risk of catastrophic losses ―in lives and economies―given a very high likelihood of another COVID-severe pandemic in our lifetime. This blog captures key points from our discussion and lays out an agenda for action on pandemic financing in 2024 for world leaders

Conor’s role at the Centre for Disaster Protection involves enhancing transparency, traceability, and consistency in disaster risk financing (DRF) deals. He is also our expert in the application of risk transfer tools like catastrophe bonds within the development landscape. Read more about how the earth sciences and geophysics specialist came to apply his expertise in disaster risk finance.

The Centre recently published findings from a multi-year research exercise that set out to understand whether it is currently possible to quantify how much money should be pre-arranged to protect low income and vulnerable populations in response to future crises.

Planning and preparing for shocks pays. Pre-arranged financing (PAF) for disasters has the potential to significantly increase the predictability, speed and effectiveness of responses to shocks, reducing the human and financial costs. We know little, however, about how much pre-arranged financing is required to protect crisis-vulnerable people against risk and how far we are from achieving adequate coverage, targeted to the right places, for those people most at risk.

The launch of a new risk transfer instrument by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) marks an important milestone for risk transfer in humanitarian contexts. In this blog post our Lead Risk Advisers, Conor Meenan and Cristina Stefan, explain what makes the policy unique.

For the past two years, the Centre for Disaster Protection Advisory team has worked with the International Federation of the Red Cross to explore an innovative financing project supporting the ambition to scale the Disaster Response Emergency Fund using risk transfer and the private insurance market.

Anna Svensson, Policy and Strategic Partnerships Officer, has spent her career working in the not-for-profit sector and multisectoral collaborations. On this International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, she reflects on the Centre's evidence workstream and how tackling disaster inequality underpins our focus on impactful disaster risk finance.

Cristina Stefan is Lead Risk Finance Adviser at the Centre for Disaster Protection. Her journey into development and epidemic risk financing began nearly a decade ago. In this blog post, she highlights the need for pre-arranged financing, fit-for purpose instruments and the right incentives to facilitate timely and effective outbreak response, if the world is to be ready for the next pandemic.