Mapping Insurance Value in EU Policy Frames

Abstract

A solution that is technically sound and economically justified can still fail for want of a policy home. This study report maps where the insurance value of ecosystems already sits inside the European policy framework, and where it does not yet sit but could.

The mapping works through the relevant instruments one by one — water, flood risk, biodiversity, climate adaptation, agriculture and rural development, regional and cohesion funding, and the disaster risk reduction commitments that the Union has entered into internationally — and records for each whether it recognises ecosystem-based risk reduction as an eligible objective, merely permits it, or is silent. Alongside the policy text, the study assembles national synthesis tables showing how the same instruments are transposed and applied in the NAIAD partner countries.

The result is a two-sided picture. Synergies exist and are more numerous than practitioners often assume, particularly where river basin management planning and flood risk management planning already share objectives. But barriers are equally real: eligibility rules written around engineered assets, appraisal methods with no line for ecosystem services, procurement and licensing procedures that do not accommodate interventions without a single owner, and the absence of a body with a mandate to fund measures whose beneficiaries are diffuse.