Disaster Insurance Reimagined

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book examines the growing role and importance of 'Protection Gap Entities' (PGEs), not-for-profit entities providing insurance protection that would otherwise be unavailable within a purely private sector context. Around the world, PGEs and the insurance instruments they use are becoming increasingly crucial in making sure that funds are available to rebuild after disasters. These PGEs, typically developed as collaborations between governments and the insurance industry, enable insurance to continue at a time when climate change, urbanization, global interdependence, and geo-political instability are making disaster insurance increasingly expensive or unavailable. Given their growing importance, understanding the role of PGEs in both insurance protection and their potential to create a more resilient society is critical. Disaster Insurance Reimagined uses practical examples from different countries to explain how PGEs step in to maintain disaster insurance and how their work can, but does not always, improve financial and physical resilience to disaster. Drawing on 5 years of research into 17 entities that provide insurance cover in 49 countries, the authors examine the strengths, limitations, and evolution of PGEs in providing disaster protection in the face of a growing insurance crisis. They provide an accessible discussion of disaster insurance, its complexities, and the transformation it needs to undergo in order to remain relevant and to contribute to meaningful disaster protection. PGEs and their work offer a path to re-imagining disaster insurance as a key tool in an ecosystem that has societal protection from disaster at its heart.