10-minute Explainer: What the insurance industry can do for climate change, with Ekhosuehi Iyahen (Insurance Development Forum)

Why you should watch: The IDF is a public/private partnership, involving the UN, the World Bank and private insurers, with a mandate to 'build greater resilience against disasters and to help achieve the UN Global 2030 Agenda'. There is a bit of fluff in there, but it is clearly doing good work with the most vulnerable countries (the so-called V20) on both catastrophe insurance for sudden disasters (hurricanes etc) and for 'slow onset' problems like drought in the Sahel. It is also in the vanguard of building ex ante resilience, not least through better data collection and through Covid-induced 'risk literacy'. It is part of the UN's Net Zero Insurance Alliance, which has pledged to bring insurance and reinsurance portfolios in line with net-zero GHG emissions by 2050.

Ekhosuehi Iyahen was appointed Secretary-general of the Insurance Development Forum in 2018, having previously worked with the African Risk Capacity Agency in Jo'burg and with the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. She was educated at the University of the West Indies, LSE and the Kennedy School at Harvard, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at Bellagio.