The pressing challenges of financing disaster resilience, insurance and climate adaptation brought together a diverse group of experts from government, academia and the insurance and finance industries at the Australian National University (ANU) Disaster Solutions Update and Roundtable 2024 in August.
The event, supported by Natural Hazards Research Australia (the Centre) and subsequent paper, Who pays for disasters and how? Setting the scene for research and action underscore the growing urgency for Australia to strengthen its disaster resilience in response to increasingly frequent and severe natural hazards.
Centre CEO Andrew Gissing led a workshop in identifying challenges and possible solutions required to better understand and mitigate the costs associated with increasing natural hazards and encouraged Centre Participants to consider research priorities arising from the workshop when putting forward ideas in future research concept rounds.
“The workshop provided an excellent opportunity to assemble senior policy makers, practitioners and researchers to discuss disaster finance challenges and solutions to build a safe, resilient and sustainable future,” Andrew said.
“As we are faced with worsening natural hazard risk and rising insurance affordability research has a key role to drive future policy in priority areas via transformational solutions.”
The discussions highlighted the complex interplay between climate change, insurance costs, finance and community resilience, with a focus on developing innovative solutions and fostering public-private collaboration to mitigate risks and protect vulnerable communities.
According to the paper, addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach involving improved resilience, ecosystem restoration, innovative research, transformational solutions, bridging the insurance gap and decisive government action, with current disaster-related costs far outweighing investment.
Investing in these areas now provides the necessary options to reduce the devastating human and economic costs of future disasters. However, the question of who ultimately pays and how remains a complex and contentious issue that society must urgently grapple with as the impacts of climate change intensify.
Roundtable participants identified three major research priorities to address these goals:
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How can we change the land use and building code policy framework to reflect a changing climate?
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How can we make insurance a form of climate adaptation?
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How can we decide who acts when, balancing urgent needs against future gains, given limited information?
Roundtable outcomes were recently presented to the Senate Select Committee - Impact of Climate Risk on Insurance Premiums and Availability, underscoring the value of this work in informing policy makers at all levels.
Read more and download the full report here.