Water for Economic Resilience 2024 Webinar Series
Unlocking Economic Resilience: Mobilizing Water & Climate for Thriving Economies
Webinar Series Overview
Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to national economies, disrupting established trade relationships, rendering supply chains brittle, stranding investments, and generating new socioeconomic inequities. Climate change is no longer simply a de-risking or engineering problem. Instead, policymakers, the private sector, and economic planners need to articulate new choices that can tolerate systemic climate uncertainty while enabling new qualities, such as redundancy, flexibility, and robustness.
Despite warnings in the two decades since the influential Stern Review, economic planning in most cases still integrates climate dynamics inadequately and incompletely. This webinar series aims to bridge this gap, focusing on resilience as a macroeconomic concept across insurance, banking, credit and risk ratings, and economic planning and policy.
The webinar series underscores resilience as a new economic principle often overlooked in traditional economic analyses. As suggested by Nobel laureate William Nordhaus and other scholars, climate-induced shocks can reverberate through economies, affecting productivity, resource availability, and overall economic stability. We highlight the inadequacies of conventional economic tools in addressing climate uncertainty and propose innovative frameworks that embrace risk, uncertainty, and social dimensions to inform strategic adaptation investments.
In many cases, water resources are emerging as both as a systemic hazard exacerbating climate vulnerabilities and as the currency we spend through economic systems to purchase resilience and maximize coherence and efficacy.
Upcoming Webinars
Webinar 2: Banking and Lending: How Do We Invest in Resilience?
May 13, 2024 (TBC)
Webinar 3: Credit Ratings: Can Resilience Be Investment Grade?
September 2, 2024 (TBC)
Webinar 4: Macroeconomic Policy: Incentivizing Resilient Economies
October 1, 2024 (TBC)
Webinar 1: Insurance and Reinsurance: Sharing Risks, Building Resilience
April 9, 2024
For centuries, the insurance sector has fueled economic growth by transferring and sharing risks across institutions and investors. To do this, insurance has innovated in how we conceive, identify, and quantify hazards, even as insurance costs have acted as an incentive for reducing exposure to hazards. Indeed, modern economies evolved with and require insurance as a backstop and foundation.
Climate change is altering these arrangements in profound ways. Fire hazards, flash droughts, sea-level rise, and expanding floodplains are just a few signs of a tilting landscape. As new risks appear, so do new demands and novel roles for insurance and reinsurance globally. At the same time, little consensus has emerged in how we identify, interpret, and reduce the threat of uncertain, emerging hazards. And the shifting nature of risk assessment also raises concerns about how we regulate insurance and how to best balance public sector and commercial instruments. Water-related hazards are at the center of this discussion given the sensitivity of the water cycle to climate change. In some cases, commercial options are retreating even as climate impacts accelerate. Water-based resilience may also have the potential to drive systemic solutions across sectors. Should insurance play a role in advancing new roles and responses?
In this webinar, we will actively explore the state of play around both risk and resilience in the insurance sector, for consumers and regulators of insurance, and for the broader economy. The ideas we present here are intended to feed into the overall webinar series and into a policy guidance for early 2025.
Featured Speakers
Our featured speakers for this event include:
Thomas Kessler, Principal Finance Specialist (Disaster Insurance), Sector Group Finance; Asian Development Bank
Elsa Sánchez Elizo, Responsible for Strategy and Corporate Governance, Agroseguro
José Antonio Hurtado, Deputy Director, Agricultural Insurance; Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS)
Sophie Trémolet, Water Team Lead; OECD Environment Directorate
Speakers
Thomas Kessler - Thomas has more than 25 years of experience in the private reinsurance market having actively managed risks, developed (re)insurance markets and implemented innovative insurance solutions for the private and public sector to close the protection gap in the area of natural hazard, credit, political, property and casualty, agriculture and life & health risks. Since 2018 at the Asian Development Bank and in his current role in the Sector Group Finance, he is supporting the development of sustainable and climate finance solutions, amongst else leveraging the value proposition of the insurance industry, and to unlock private sector capital and investments into resilient infrastructure, blue and green SME, energy efficiency, bamboo value chain, and disaster risk financing.
Elsa Sánchez Elizo - Elsa Sánchez is an Administration and Business Management Graduate, specialized in financial and insurance management. She has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and agricultural risk management. She has performed her professional career in Agroseguro, which is the management company for the Spanish agroinsurance pool. Elsa currently works as Responsible for Strategy and Corporate Governance, providing technical support on corporate strategy, governance system, sustainability and ESG policy and regulatory compliance, amongst others. She is also in charge of international affairs at the company, providing support to other countries in developing their own agroinsurance models.
José Antonio Hurtado Puerta - José Antonio is an agricultural engineer, with specialization in plant engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. After four years working for two multinationals of field crop seeds, he joined the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS) in 1991. It is through CCS that he has developed most of his professional career. He first served as head of agricultural insurance, focused on the task of adjustment control and taking part in meetings reviewing the agricultural insurance lines as representative of the CCS. He is currently the Deputy Director of Agricultural Insurance.
Sophie Trémolet - Sophie Trémolet leads the Water Team within the Environment Directorate at the OECD, which focuses specifically on advising OECD member countries and partners on water economics and finance as well as a specific focus on water quality and reuse. Sophie recently joined the OECD in Paris from The Nature Conservancy, where she worked for the past five years on restoring and protecting rivers of high biodiversity value and accelerating investment in nature-based solutions for water security in Europe and globally. Prior to that, Sophie had worked for 18 years as a consultant on issues of financing, institutional and regulatory reforms and private sector participation in the water sector, first as a consultant to a broad range of clients, including leading development banks, governments, NGOs, foundations and universities. She then joined the World Bank’s Global Water practice as a Senior Economist where she led the preparation and supervised projects in West Africa, contributed to establishing a new multi-donor Trust Fund and developed the Bank’s approaches and tools in blended finance for water. Sophie holds a double Master’s in Economics and International Development from Sciences-Po (Paris) and Columbia University (New York).
Audience
The series targets macroeconomists, economic planners, central bankers, finance and development ministries, insurance and reinsurance programs, commercial banks, credit rating agencies, city planners, corporations reliant on critical infrastructure, and infrastructure funders and designers. Through engaging discussions, case studies, and expert insights, the series endeavors to foster a deeper understanding of resilience as a fundamental economic imperative and equip stakeholders with practical strategies to navigate the complex challenges posed by climate change.
Co-convenors
Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Australian Water Partnership, Deltares, French Ministry Ecology, Energy, and Territories, French Water Partnership, German Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Global Commons Alliance (GCA), Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), US State Department, US Treasury Department, Veolia, Water Policy Group, Wetlands International, World Bank
Previous WR4ER Webinars
Climate Hope from the Dismal Science: How Macroeconomic Policy and Water Resilience Can Guide Us towards Prosperity
This session introduced the WR4ER initiative and provided an overview of its objectives and significance. It is structured to delve into some of the challenges and opportunities that can cultivate an economics of resilience. This event took place on 15 November 2023.
Who We Are
The Water Resilience for Economic Resilience (WR4ER) initiative is a global partnership that aims to harness the emerging insights on climate change and integrate them into economic planning and management. As a group, we believe resilience is not an accident but rather a deliberate outcome that requires careful planning and strategic investment. WR4ER’s unwavering commitment lies in providing economic decision-makers with the essential evidence necessary to position what the IPCC terms "water-based adaptation" at the core of their resilience-focused investments, planning endeavors, and policy formulation. Our cross-sectoral partnership is designed to develop transformative tools and approaches that enable the water-centric economic resilience principles necessary to achieve all the SDGs — including SDG 6.