CARICOM SG calls for more affordable disaster insurance

Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Irwin LaRocque wants the cost of natural disaster insurance to be more affordable.

According to a CARICOM release, this statement was made by Ambassador LaRocque on Tuesday when he spoke at a panel at the “Insurance Colloquium: Insurance in the age of climate change” at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre in Barbados. The panel was a collaboration between the Inter-American Development Bank and the Government of Barbados.

The Secretary-General informed the panel that governments in the region lacked the fiscal space to afford the insurance required to provide adequate financial resilience given the increase in “intensity and frequency of natural disasters due to climate change.” He pointed out that “in our region there was a 66 per cent protection gap between the economic costs of damage and insured losses as against 55 per cent in developed countries.”

LaRocque reminded that it was the most vulnerable in the society who were most affected and who had the least capacity to afford the insurance. This in turn increases the responsibility of governments to provide the necessary relief while insurance premiums keep rising.

On the subject of the Challenge of Climate Change, the Secretary-General opined that the real need for the region was to address its vulnerability prior to a disaster, adding, “each dollar spent on resilience saves between four and seven dollars of reconstruction and rebuilding costs after a disaster.”

He reiterated his call for using vulnerability as the criterion in determining concessional development financing instead of GDP (gross domestic product) per capita, the release added.