Page - 323 - in Loss and Damage from Climate Change - Concepts, Methods and Policy Options

13 ExploringandManagingAdaptationFrontiers… 323 Fig.13.2 The roleofinsurance inmanagingadaptation frontiers. SourceAuthor’sown 13.3.1 InsuranceasPartofaRiskSignallingMechanism Tobeable tomake informeddecisions inaworldof increasingclimate risks, actors need to explore adaptation frontiers. Therefore, countries and people need reliable informationabout themagnitude, location, andexposure to climate-related risks as well as signals to determine their leeway regarding adaption limits. Risk transfer tools like insurance can support risk signallingmechanisms in the following two ways. Catalysing Risk Assessment to Signal the Magnitude, Location and Exposure to Climate-RelatedRisks Assessing the risk of losses and damages is a prerequisite for identifying needs and policy priorities. Risk assessment brings attention to the hazard potential, the exposure andvulnerability, and in thisway it can raise awareness and expose new options formanaging the risks (Warner and Spiegel 2009). Publicly collected and opensourcedataandriskassessments,aswellasopensourcehazardmodelling,can contributemeaningfully to national and regional risk-management and investment decisions.However, risk assessments are often not performed in developing coun- tries (Collier et al. 2009).Being theprecondition forcalculatingpremiumlevels for policyholders,riskassessmentisavitalpartofinsurance.Accordingly,insurancecan beonewaytofacilitateregionalandinternationaldataanalysis—suchasestablishing data standards,methods and data repositories—and can therefore be a catalyst for risk assessment. Thereby, insurance-related tools can help set up a framework for signalling themagnitude, location,andexposure toclimate-relatedrisks. At country level, the African Risk Capacity’s (ARC) riskmodelling and early warning software platform,Africa RiskView, uses satellite-based data to estimate