How cities and the insurance sector can manage climate risk together: lessons from four years of the Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship
Climate risk is rising for cities and insurers alike. Extreme climate events caused an estimated USD 4.5 trillion in direct economic losses worldwide between 1995 and 2024, and a growing share of that cost now falls on municipal budgets. In 2022, Howden, Resilient Cities Network and the Sustainable Markets Initiative launched the Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship to embed insurance expertise inside city governments. Over four years, Fellows worked alongside Chief Resilience Officers and municipal finance teams in 13 cities.
This report brings together what those cities learned. Insurers use their tools to identify, quantify and price risk, and cities can use the same tools to look beyond past events and cost the full impact of climate disruption. That evidence helps them build the case for resilience investment. In New York, modeling showed a major coastal flood defense could cut expected losses from severe hurricanes by 97%. In Cape Town, a new framework captured the hidden costs of flooding in informal settlements. In Greater Miami, a community-scale parametric insurance policy designed through the Fellowship was later purchased by the Miami Foundation.
The Fellowship is concluding, but its lessons point to a clear next step: making collaboration between cities and the insurance sector systematic rather than occasional.
