Future-Proofing Our World

A Roadmap to Close the Crisis Protection Gap through Pre-arranged Finance

The High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap formed in January 2024, bringing together a group of 20 expert members from across sectors and geographies. Over the course of the last year, it has engaged with stakeholders across multiple sectors – public, private, and civil society – gathering insights through structured interviews, discussions and working groups, consultation, analysis and review.

Our vision is of a crisis financing architecture fit for purpose and ready to meet the challenge of today and tomorrow. An approach that ensures the most crisis-vulnerable communities and countries are better protected, better placed to manage rising risks, and better able to recover quickly when crises strike. At the heart of this ‘Crisis Protection 2.0’ agenda is a call to reset the crisis financing architecture – to move from reaction to readiness.

The Panel’s central challenge is: how can we increase the proportion of pre-arranged crisis finance tenfold by 2035? Their answer is a set of ten strategic recommendations that together make up the transformative vision of Crisis Protection 2.0. This, then, is our roadmap to transition.

Crisis Protection 2.0

Climate-related and other crises are becoming more frequent and costly. These crises come in many forms, but without a fundamental shift in how we prepare for them, the result will be the same: severe impacts on lives, livelihoods, economies and ecosystems. Consequences will ripple across societies, deepening vulnerabilities and curtailing growth and progress for years—if not decades. With the human and economic cost already mounting, the world cannot afford to go on treating crises as unexpected surprises.

Ten Strategic Recommendations

The following are the ten headline recommendations. Please see the link to the Panel’s final report below to read the full detail behind each of these recommendations.

1. All countries need to make improved arrangements to increase the proportion of crisis finance deployed as pre-arranged financing by 2035

2. Position national leadership and ownership at the heart of crisis finance

3. Recast the role of the IMF to support this critical shift

4. Donors and the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage must increase the quantity of affordable, quality crisis finance for all crisis-vulnerable countries

5. MDBs and the Global Shield against Climate Risk should widen access to the full suite of crisis protection instruments

6. All countries must commit to public-private action and advance the partnerships needed to evolve insurance offerings, especially public asset insurance

7. Donors must invest to scale sustainable, transparent and effective regional risk pools – and the risk pools’ client countries must significantly increase their uptake and cost sharing

8. Invest in scaling action in FCV settings

9. Integrate pre-arranged finance coherently into UN operations and strategies

10. Deliver a step change in trust and effectiveness by increasing transparency

Download the Report

The High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap’s new report Crisis Protection 2.0: Future-Proofing Our World sets out an ambitious roadmap to radically transform international crisis finance in the next ten years. The goal is to accelerate a shift from reaction to readiness by making proactive, pre-arranged crisis financing the default instead of the exception.

Momentum for change is building. There is a unique window of opportunity to close the crisis protection gap and protect lives, livelihoods and future generations from disasters. This Report is a roadmap to making crisis finance faster, more predictable, more equitable, and ready to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

What is the Crisis Protection Gap?

Disasters occur all over the world. But a flood or wildfire that is manageable in one country, can be catastrophic in another. It all depends on readiness to respond—including financially. The ‘crisis protection gap’ is the systemic shortfall in proactive crisis planning and predictable crisis financing. It’s the difference between the expected crisis costs, and the finance arranged in advance to meet them.

The crisis protection gap is growing wider in the face of more frequent and severe shocks. Closing the gap requires a fundamental shift in the way the world finances and prepares for crises—a shift from reaction to readiness.

Why Pre-arranged Crisis Financing?

Today we can model future risks with ever greater precision, thanks to advances in technology, data and new ways of working. But we still wait until after disasters strike to react. This leaves vulnerable countries and communities exposed to escalating costs and dependent on reactive, fragmented post-crisis financing. Pre-arranged financing is agreed in advance of shocks and activates automatically when crisis hits. It means money is available more quickly and can move faster to where it’s needed most.

But, today, less than 2% of international crisis financing is pre-arranged—and only a tiny portion of that reaches low-income countries. That is not enough.

We urgently need to scale affordable, adaptable pre-arranged finance for the millions of people in conflict-affected and vulnerable states. If not, the consequences for people, economies and ecosystems will be dire.

About the Panel

  • Sir Mark Lowcock KCB

    Co-Chair, High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap

    Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Robert Bosch Academy. Former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

  • Arunma Oteh OON

    Co-Chair, High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap

    Executive in Residence and member, Global Leadership Council, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Former World Bank Vice President and Treasurer

  • Nicholas Reader

    Secretariat Lead, High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap

    Independent Consultant

  • Hassan Bashir

    Executive Director at the Agency for Inclusive Innovations and Development (AIID)

  • Colin Bruce

    Co-Chair of the Centre for Disaster Protection and Special Envoy, Humanitarian and Development Affairs at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

  • Daniel Clarke

    Director of the Centre for Disaster Protection

  • Rosalia V. De Leon

    Monetary Board Member of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Former Treasurer of the Philippines

  • Stefan Dercon CMG

    Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies

  • Amanda Glassman

    Executive Advisor to the President at the Inter-American Development Bank

  • Kazi Amdadul Hoque

    Senior Director of Strategic Planning and Head of Climate Action at Friendship (NGO). Climate, development, and humanitarian activist

  • Ekhosuehi Iyahen

    Secretary General of the Insurance Development Forum

  • Alexandre Le Cuziat

    Senior Emergency Advisor for West and Central Africa, UN World Food Programme (WFP)

  • Daniel Lund

    Special Adviser - Climate Action, Government of Fiji. Former member of the Transitional Committee and Board of the UNFCCC Fund for responding to Loss and Damage

  • Maxwell Mkwezalamba

    Chairperson of the Board, African Risk Capacity (ARC) Ltd. Former Minister of Finance, Malawi. Former Executive Director at IMF

  • Mahmoud Mohieldin

    UN Special Envoy on Financing the 2030 Agenda. Former Minister of Investment of Egypt. Former Executive Director at IMF

  • Veronica Scotti

    Group Managing Director and Chairperson Public Sector Solutions (PSS), Swiss Re

  • Phil Stevens

    Director for International Finance, UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)

  • Nena Stoiljkovic

    Under Secretary General for Global Relations, Humanitarian Diplomacy and Digitalization, The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

  • Hon. Ryan R. Straughn

    Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Affairs and Investment in the Government of Barbados.  Co-Chair of the Global Shield against Climate Risks, a joint initiative of the G7 and V20 Group of Finance Ministers

  • Rachel Turner CBE

    Independent Development Finance Expert. Board of Directors of IFFIm, the International Finance Facility for Immunisation. Former Director for International Finance, UK FCDO

Secretariat

The Secretariat for the High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap is supported by the Centre for Disaster Protection. The Centre for Disaster Protection works to prevent disasters devastating lives, by helping people, countries and organisations change how they plan and pay for disasters.

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