The United Nations Environment’s Principles for Sustainable Initiative and the Luxembourg-based Microinsurance Network have joined forces to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The Microinsurance Network, the multi-stakeholder platform for the world’s microinsurance community of experts and institutions, has joined UN Environment’s Principles for Sustainable Insurance Initiative (PSI) in what is the largest collaborative initiative between the United Nations and the insurance industry.
The PSI-Microinsurance Network partnership aims to advance the social and financial inclusion dimension of sustainable insurance with the goal of closing the insurance protection gap, ie the gap between economic losses from all disaster events and insured losses. According to Swiss Re, the global insurance protection gap in 2016 was $121 billion.
Endorsed by the UN Secretary-General and insurance CEOs, the PSI serves as a global framework and global collaborative initiative for the insurance industry to address environmental, social and governance challenges, such as climate change, natural disasters, ecosystem degradation, financial exclusion, human rights violations, health risks and corruption, and to strengthen the industry’s contribution to sustainable development.
Additionally, according to Butch Bacani, who leads the PSI at UN Environment: “The UN Sustainable Development Goals are premised on the pledge of ‘leaving no one behind’. This landmark partnership to build inclusive and sustainable insurance markets underscores that in order to fulfil that pledge, we must reach out to those behind first.”
The PSI and the Microinsurance Network have identified various areas of collaboration, including knowledge sharing, policy engagement, capacity building, and events. The collaboration will harness the insurance industry’s role in helping communities reduce risk through good risk management practices, in absorbing financial shocks and enabling economic activity through insurance solutions, and in financing the transformation to a sustainable economy through investments.
The Microinsurance Network will also work with the PSI on the inclusive insurance elements of national and city-level sustainable insurance roadmaps being developed, and in the implementation of global policy frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
