Insurance Development Forum (IDF)
A public-private partnership launched at COP21 in 2015 between the insurance industry, the United Nations and the World Bank to extend insurance and risk modeling to the most exposed countries.
The Insurance Development Forum was born in 2015, on the sidelines of the Paris climate conference, from a simple idea: the insurance industry holds two skills that vulnerable countries lack, measuring risk and the capital to carry it, while public institutions hold access to governments. The forum brings together insurers and reinsurers, brokers, modelers, the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank. Its work covers three fields. Modeling first, by making open risk models available to countries that have none, without which no cover can be priced. The legal and regulatory framework next, because an insurance market requires credible contract law and prudential supervision. Programs last, with sovereign or parametric covers designed for states, cities or farming sectors. The forum is not an insurer: it carries no risk of its own, and its results are measured by the number of covers actually placed, which remains modest compared with the protection gap. It illustrates the thesis that the protection gap is first a gap in data and institutions, before being a gap in capital.
Hypothetical case: a Pacific island state wants parametric cyclone cover but has no local risk model. Through the forum, an open model is built on its exposure data, which then allows reinsurers to quote the cover.
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