IVE Survey results

Description

The Insurance Value of Ecosystems survey was carried out across the countries represented in NAIAD to establish how differently national insurance systems treat the risk-reduction contribution of ecosystems — and therefore how differently the same Nature Based Solution would be received in each of them.

The systems differ fundamentally. The French natural catastrophe compensation scheme, the Anglo-Saxon markets, and the Nordic and Central European arrangements place the boundary between state, market and insured in different places, leave different scope for prevention expenditure, and attach different consequences to a refusal to mitigate. The survey records those differences systematically rather than anecdotally, so that a finding from one country can be read against the structure that produced it.

The results provide the comparative basis for the work on the (re)insurance sector's roles, and they are what makes it possible to say which conclusions about the sector are general and which are specific to a market design.

Applications to decision making in the insurance sector

It gives a carrier or an association a structured view of how its own arrangement compares with others on the specific question of prevention, and it identifies the levers that exist within a given system — regulatory, contractual or fiscal — for recognising ecosystem-based risk reduction.

Added value of this modelling approach

It replaces the assumption that insurance systems are broadly similar with evidence that they are not. Most of the difficulty in transferring an NBS financing model between countries comes from exactly this difference, and the survey makes it visible before the transfer is attempted.

What decision can be improved with this modelling approach

Whether a financing model developed in one country can be transposed to another; which actor in a national system should be approached first; and what regulatory or contractual change would be needed for a carrier to recognise an NBS in its pricing.