Water for Economic Resilience 2024 Webinar Series
Unlocking Economic Resilience: Mobilizing Water & Climate for Thriving Economies
Webinar Series Overview
Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to national economies, disrupting established trade relationships, rendering supply chains brittle, stranding investments, and generating new socioeconomic inequities. Climate change is no longer simply a de-risking or engineering problem. Instead, policymakers, the private sector, and economic planners need to articulate new choices that can tolerate systemic climate uncertainty while enabling new qualities, such as redundancy, flexibility, and robustness.
Despite warnings in the two decades since the influential Stern Review, economic planning in most cases still integrates climate dynamics inadequately and incompletely. This webinar series aims to bridge this gap, focusing on resilience as a macroeconomic concept across insurance, banking, credit and risk ratings, and economic planning and policy.
The webinar series underscores resilience as a new economic principle often overlooked in traditional economic analyses. As suggested by Nobel laureate William Nordhaus and other scholars, climate-induced shocks can reverberate through economies, affecting productivity, resource availability, and overall economic stability. We highlight the inadequacies of conventional economic tools in addressing climate uncertainty and propose innovative frameworks that embrace risk, uncertainty, and social dimensions to inform strategic adaptation investments.
In many cases, water resources are emerging as both as a systemic hazard exacerbating climate vulnerabilities and as the currency we spend through economic systems to purchase resilience and maximize coherence and efficacy.
Upcoming Webinars
Webinar 3: Assessing Water Resilience: The Intersection of Credit Ratings and Climate Adaptation
15 January 2024 - REGISTER HERE
Webinar 4: Macroeconomic Policy: Incentivizing Resilient Economies
February 2025 (tbc)
Co-convenors
Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Australian Water Partnership, Deltares, French Ministry Ecology, Energy, and Territories, French Water Partnership, German Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Global Commons Alliance (GCA), Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), US State Department, US Treasury Department, Veolia, Water Policy Group, Wetlands International, World Bank
Audience
The series targets macroeconomists, economic planners, central bankers, finance and development ministries, insurance and reinsurance programs, commercial banks, credit rating agencies, city planners, corporations reliant on critical infrastructure, and infrastructure funders and designers. Through engaging discussions, case studies, and expert insights, the series endeavors to foster a deeper understanding of resilience as a fundamental economic imperative and equip stakeholders with practical strategies to navigate the complex challenges posed by climate change.
Webinar 1: Insurance and Reinsurance: Sharing Risks, Building Resilience
April 9, 2024
For centuries, the insurance sector has fueled economic growth by transferring and sharing risks across institutions and investors. To do this, insurance has innovated in how we conceive, identify, and quantify hazards, even as insurance costs have acted as an incentive for reducing exposure to hazards. Indeed, modern economies evolved with and require insurance as a backstop and foundation.
Climate change is altering these arrangements in profound ways. Fire hazards, flash droughts, sea-level rise, and expanding floodplains are just a few signs of a tilting landscape. As new risks appear, so do new demands and novel roles for insurance and reinsurance globally. At the same time, little consensus has emerged in how we identify, interpret, and reduce the threat of uncertain, emerging hazards. And the shifting nature of risk assessment also raises concerns about how we regulate insurance and how to best balance public sector and commercial instruments. Water-related hazards are at the center of this discussion given the sensitivity of the water cycle to climate change. In some cases, commercial options are retreating even as climate impacts accelerate. Water-based resilience may also have the potential to drive systemic solutions across sectors. Should insurance play a role in advancing new roles and responses?
In this webinar, we will actively explore the state of play around both risk and resilience in the insurance sector, for consumers and regulators of insurance, and for the broader economy. The ideas we present here are intended to feed into the overall webinar series and into a policy guidance for early 2025.
Featured Speakers
Our featured speakers for this event include:
Thomas Kessler, Principal Finance Specialist (Disaster Insurance), Sector Group Finance; Asian Development Bank
Elsa Sánchez Elizo, Responsible for Strategy and Corporate Governance, Agroseguro
José Antonio Hurtado, Deputy Director, Agricultural Insurance; Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS)
Sophie Trémolet, Water Team Lead; OECD Environment Directorate
Webinar 2: Banking for Water Resilience?
September 10, 2024
The intersection between the banking system and climate resilience has only recently emerged as a systemic regulatory and economic issue. While banks have traditionally served as a source of financial stability and economic security, they have occasionally triggered crises that can ripple throughout the larger economy. Their ability to safely hold funds and make loans are based on assumptions about risk, repayment, and liquidity that may be both violated and unquestioned by managers, investors, and regulators. Bank portfolios with traditional clients using water, such as agricultural businesses, or loans to households in flood prone areas or in areas with decreasing water resources, may be becoming financially more exposed. The so-called shadow banking system, which performs many of the same functions as formal banks and with roughly the same order of magnitude of economic power, may hold even more significant challenges because of more limited oversight or even visibility to decision makers.
This session will explore how climate change and the need for water resilience are creating new opportunities and roles for the banking sector to better incentivize risk management by lenders and borrowers. Climate change undermines longstanding assumptions about risk that can challenge liquidity, regulatory regimes, and the very roles that banking services play. Moreover, climate change increases the needs for banking services among the most climate vulnerable water services providers and users and sensitive groups who may have been excluded completely or in part from the formal economy, such as through short- and long-term credit instruments, the secure deposit and accessibility of assets, and trustworthy interactions with the larger financial system. Not least, banks are often a core component of macroeconomic policy management, which should include building water-centric economic resilience and derisking climate hazards overall and in particular for water. Indeed, during recent social, economic, and epidemiological crises, banks have served as efficient instruments for applying coherent economic policies.
Innovative approaches that reinforce the role of water in banking services, implicitly and explicitly, are essential to prepare economies to existing and emerging challenges. For instance, loans can incentivize water resilience outcomes or prioritize equity and justice for access to water-dependent services for vulnerable populations.
Key questions for this webinar include: How can we ensure that the banking system — at local, national, and global levels — can continue to help our economies build wealth, promote economic stability, and fuel critical investment despite ongoing climate impacts? Can we align economic and climate resilience by expanding access to the most vulnerable without damaging the larger financial system? Moreover, by aligning regulatory and decision making systems with the climate needs and opportunities of key sectors and investments, can we leverage banks to enable systemic water resilience through long-term investment in water resources, infrastructure, and governance?
Featured Speakers
Our featured speakers for this event include:
Nathanial Matthews - CEO, PlanetaryX
Ignacio Atance - Director of Studies, Fundación Grupo Cajamar
Thomas Panella - Senior Advisor - Water, Natural Capital, & Climate
Lylah Davies - Policy Analyst, OECD
Josefina Maestu - Honorary Lecturer, University of Alcalá, Spain
John Matthews - Executive Director, AGWA
Alex Mauroner - Chief Operating Officer, AGWA
Previous WR4ER Webinars
Climate Hope from the Dismal Science: How Macroeconomic Policy and Water Resilience Can Guide Us towards Prosperity
This session introduced the WR4ER initiative and provided an overview of its objectives and significance. It is structured to delve into some of the challenges and opportunities that can cultivate an economics of resilience. This event took place on 15 November 2023.
Who We Are
The Water Resilience for Economic Resilience (WR4ER) initiative is a global partnership that aims to harness the emerging insights on climate change and integrate them into economic planning and management. As a group, we believe resilience is not an accident but rather a deliberate outcome that requires careful planning and strategic investment. WR4ER’s unwavering commitment lies in providing economic decision-makers with the essential evidence necessary to position what the IPCC terms "water-based adaptation" at the core of their resilience-focused investments, planning endeavors, and policy formulation. Our cross-sectoral partnership is designed to develop transformative tools and approaches that enable the water-centric economic resilience principles necessary to achieve all the SDGs — including SDG 6.