From Climate Insurance Pilots to Scale: What It Takes and Who Pays
About the session
Climate and weather index-based insurance can help smallholder farmers, businesses and vulnerable communities manage increasingly severe climate shocks. Yet many promising solutions remain small pilots. Even where a product shows early potential, reaching wider and more sustainable scale requires more than additional funding. It depends on adapting the product, building trust, generating credible evidence, strengthening local capacity and bringing together insurers, governments, funders, distributors and technical partners at the right stages.
This webinar will examine what it takes to move a climate insurance solution from early innovation towards institutional or market scale. It is designed for development practitioners, funders, policymakers, researchers and other members of the scaling community, including those without specialist insurance knowledge.
The discussion will begin with the recurring challenges that prevent climate insurance solutions from scaling. Two practical cases will then show how these challenges were addressed in different contexts. Rather than focusing primarily on what each project delivered, the speakers will examine the decisions made, how the approach changed over time, which partnerships proved essential and how financing needs evolved from initial testing to wider implementation.
Participants will leave with a practical framework for assessing whether a climate insurance innovation is ready to scale, the obstacles that need to be addressed and the different roles that funders and implementation partners can play along the way.
What we'll cover:
- Lessons for scale from climate insurance implementation – what are the remaining barriers and where have models been successful in using partnerships and innovative models to scale or replicate climate insurance?
- How early-stage technical assistance helps innovators test, refine and validate climate insurance solutions before they are ready for wider investment.
The factors that turn pilot projects into solutions attractive to national stakeholders and larger-scale funders - How governments, insurers, donors and implementation partners each contribute to moving successful pilots towards wider scale."