Sectoral activities: Insurance
Strategy
The successful implementation of NbS in freshwater restoration relies heavily on collaboration and coordination across sectors due to their interdependencies and shared reliance on healthy ecosystems. Each Sectoral Strategy highlights key connections with others, emphasizing the need for integrated approaches to overcome challenges and leverage opportunities for transformation.
The Insurance Sector plays a cross-cutting role by managing risks and losses for sectors like Agriculture, Peat Extraction, and WSS. By integrating NbS into risk management strategies, Insurance companies can mitigate climate-related risks such as floods and droughts. This approach not only reduces financial risks but also encourages sectors to adopt practices that enhance ecosystem resilience. For example, promoting NbS for flood mitigation in Agriculture benefits insurers by lowering payouts for climate-related damages. To scale these efforts, supportive policies like the NRL are essential, alongside innovative Insurance products that incentivize NbS investments and reward sustainable practices.
Briefing
Insurance plays a key role in supporting climate actions – through both life and non-life insurance products. As the knowledge of how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can mitigate floods and droughts increases, the insurance sector is developing products to take account of potential risk reduction to insured assets; as well as how to insure NbS themselves. Therefore, the insurance sector can be an important enabler and intermediary in providing incentives to adopt. MERLIN will help explore data sharing and new products as well as embedding NbS further in insurance regulatory frameworks.
Roundtables
The MERLIN roundtables aim to build a Community of Practice linking the economic sector representatives with MERLIN scientific and implementation partners, MERLIN scientists meet the sector representatives three times during the four years of the project.
Roundtables 1: to understand the motivation and interest of sectors and the impact of nature restoration on the sectors.
Roundtables 2: to share examples of river restorations and their impacts on the sectors; to focus on the MERLIN cases and to discuss pro and contra arguments; to extend the number of involved stakeholders. Introduce cross-sectoral discussions, discuss policy levers and sectoral cooperation opportunities.
Roundtables 3: to discuss sectoral strategies including value chain impacts and cross sectoral needs to ensure MERLIN outputs speak to the sector.
Roundtable 1
The Insurance roundtable was held on March 31, 2022. Nine representatives from international and European insurance companies attended as well as five MERLIN partners.
Roundtable 2
On May 16th, the 2nd MERLIN Insurance Sector Roundtable was held, with around 20 participants from diverse institutions in relation with the insurance sector. During the online event, we looked at the role of the regulatory and policy framework in incentivising or hindering the insurance sector to contribute to nature restoration. The policies discussed included the EU Taxonomy, Solvency II, or the Nature Restoration Law, and the summary of the obtained results are available in the report.
Roundtable 3
A total of 18 people were present at the roundtable, including representatives of insurance companies or associations, universities and research centres, the MERLIN project and case study leaders. During the event, participants discussed the sectoral value chain analysis and the sectoral strategy.