Insurance as a Catalyst for Urban Resilience: Protecting Cities from Climate-Driven Business Interruption
Description
Extreme weather events, climate-driven disruptions and cascading service failures increasingly threaten urban systems. While attention often focuses on physical damage, the more profound impact is frequently business interruption – small and medium enterprises, transit services, municipal service functions, and overtime costs for emergency response.
This session will explore how insurance – going beyond indemnification – can serve as a strategic instrument for urban resilience by:
- Covering business interruption losses faced by cities and their service ecosystems.
- Incentivizing adaptation investments (e.g., premium discounts, performance-linked underwriting).
- Supporting innovative resilience finance (e.g., guarantees for resilience-linked debt, resilience bonds).
- Enabling cities to shift from reactive recovery to proactive adaptation and continuity of operations.
Why this matters for cities
Cities are increasingly exposed to climate shocks, and traditional property damage coverages do not fully address the service / operational disruption dimension. By integrating tailored insurance solutions, city decision-makers can:
- Maintain critical services and infrastructure operations during/after events.
- Protect local economies and communities (SMEs, supply chains, mobility).
- Mobilize private-sector capital and risk management tools to drive adaptation spending.
- Create a virtuous cycle: more resilient → lower risk → more affordable insurance → further investment.
Key questions to be addressed
- How can business interruption risks for cities, transit, SMEs and municipal functions be quantified and insured?
- What insurance product designs or market innovations are emerging (premium-incentivized adaptation, parametric triggers, resilience bonds)?
- How can insurers, municipal finance, and adaptation planning be aligned to create scalable mechanisms?
- What are real-world examples or pilot programmes where insurance has catalysed resilience investment in a city context?
- What are the barriers (data, modelling, regulatory, financing) and how might they be overcome?
Target participants
City-government officials (climate/adaptation/finance), insurance and re-insurance practitioners, risk modelling firms, municipal finance specialists, academics and researchers in resilience, infrastructure and climate risk, and representatives of small-business and transit stakeholders.
Session format and audience engagement
The session will comprise a short framing presentation, followed by a panel discussion featuring representatives from the insurance industry, city officials, and insurers, with audience Q&A and interactive breakout (or facilitated discussion) on crafting city-insurance pathways.
Call for contributions / abstracts
We welcome proposed papers, case studies or practical projects addressing any of the above themes. Submission may follow the standard guidelines of ICONHIC for curated sessions. Accepted contributions may be invited for oral presentation or poster.