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Cities on the climate frontline: the 2024 Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship
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Advancing urban resilience in the face of climate change
The 2024 Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship, a collaboration between Howden, the Resilient Cities Network, and the Sustainable Markets Initiative, has expanded on the success of the inaugural 2023 programme. In 2024, the Fellowship's focus remained on helping cities build resilience to climate-related risks, particularly flooding, and on leveraging insurance as a tool to de-risk infrastructure investments.
The Fellowship connects insurance professionals with city leaders to enhance urban resilience and sustainability. Fellows, selected from the insurance sector, work with Chief Resilience Officers (CROs) and other city officials to address specific challenges in building resilience. By combining insurance expertise with city planning, the initiative fosters private and public sector collaboration to develop effective, long-term solutions to urban challenges.
The 2024 Fellowship focused on five new cities across three continents: Manchester, UK; Lagos, Nigeria; Norfolk and Oakland, USA; and Cape Town, South Africa. Across these five diverse cities, there were three central themes that united the 2024 Fellowship projects:
The need for cities to assess and articulate the cost of failing to adapt to climate perils
The role of insurance to de-risk investment to reduce the cost of capital required to build adaptive infrastructure
How innovative parametric insurance can be coupled with other tools to manage the increasingly severe climate shocks already faced by cities.
This report provides a detailed overview of the outcomes of the 2024 Fellowship projects.
The Fellowship is a strategic initiative led by Howden, the Sustainable Markets Initiative, a global private sector organisation, and Resilient Cities Network, the world’s leading city-led network on urban resilience.
David Howden, CEO of Howden, represents Howden on the SMI's Insurance Taskforce, which drives cross sector collaboration on issues of risk.
The Fellowship is an incredible initiative and in 2024 our fantastic Fellows continued the amazing work of the inaugural cohort. Joining forces with urban leaders as well as experts in insurance, climate finance, and engineering, they devised imaginative responses to complex risks in five new cities.
Learnings from previous years
The 2023 Fellowship highlighted a marked divergence between how the insurance sector and city leaders understand risk and the language they each use to describe it.
The Fellowship called for cities and the insurance sector to align on a shared understanding of risk and preparedness to effectively work together to unlock resilience building solutions.
The project in Greater Miami and the Beaches was among the success stories from the 2023 Fellowship, resulting in the purchase of a tropical cyclone parametric policy by the Miami Foundation aimed at protecting low-income communities and small businesses.
