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30 September 2021
In July 2021, catastrophic flooding inundated parts of Germany and Belgium with damage spreading further into neighboring countries. The flooding took the lives of over 200 people and caused devastating damage to homes and businesses; the insurance industry is expecting losses on the scale of billions of EUR . Governments will bear much of the cost of this flooding. Germany has announced an immediate aid package of EUR 472 million to support affected people. The European Union Solidarity Fund... Keep reading
03 August 2021
The World Bank Crisis & Disaster Risk Finance team (CDRF) at the Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation (FCI) Global Practice has put in place a technical assistance program on Crisis Risk Finance Analytics (CRFA) which leverages innovative analytics at global, country, and project levels to create an enabling environment for improved risk financing and risk management. The program is funded by Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF) and is under the joint technical partnership between the... Keep reading
16 July 2021
During a recent training session about The Role of Financial Market Solutions for Building Resilience to Shocks in Agriculture , we asked a simple question to a group of policy makers and private sector players: “Which financial services do you think play a role in boosting rural resilience?” To our surprise, while participants were given the possibility to select several answers, many of them chose only one: insurance. With several years of combined experience on the development of... Keep reading
24 June 2021
Climate shocks and natural disasters have long-lasting effects — human, social, economic, and environmental. Managing them is a key challenge, from a financial standpoint as much as any other, for governments across the globe. Funding recovery or reconstruction in the aftermath of a disaster relies on solid, private, financial markets. These capital and reinsurance markets offer financing options to help governments diversify the cost of risk away from their own economies. In having a disaster... Keep reading
15 June 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt with the most severe blow to the global economy since 1929, with devastating, long-lasting effects on government balance sheets. While the impact of the pandemic has been unprecedented in scale and type, the systemic crises stemming from it are likely to happen more often in our modern, interconnected world. COVID-19 reminds us that shocks can cascade and compound in complex ways, with broad fiscal, economic, financial and social implications. Understanding this... Keep reading
04 June 2021
Developments in satellite technology, remote sensing, and big data allow us to collect an unprecedented amount of valuable information. Antoine Bavandi , a Senior Financial Sector Specialist at the World Bank Group’s Crisis and Disaster Risk Finance team, talks about how this can be leveraged to address emerging and complex risks. This video illustrates three practical examples of how large-scale satellite-data applications can help improve financial resilience and benefit the world’s most... Keep reading
27 May 2021
Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in the heart of the Sahel region, was already facing difficult challenges when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred. The security context had been deteriorating since June 2018, with an upsurge in violent attacks by terrorists and criminal groups. The country is now experiencing a rapidly growing crisis in internally displaced persons (IDPs); the number of IDPs increased from 50,000 in January 2019 to over 1 million in August 2020. The country is also facing a food... Keep reading