This research was conducted within a Ph.D. project, carried out by Simon Wagner affiliated with the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) and the University of Bonn. The research aimed at supporting a scoping study of flood insurance in the Lower Mono River basin by assessing the topic in a broader manner without directly focusing on one type of flood impacts. This research was conducted as a contribution to the CLIMAFRI project.

With USD 252 billion of reported economic damage caused by natural disasters, 2021 became the fourth most damaging year recorded over the last two decades (CRED, 2021). Hurricane Ida alone caused USD 65 billion in damages and ranks as the 6th most damaging natural disaster of the last 20 years. The recently published IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (IPCC, 2022a) warns urgently that the risks of climate change continue to increase, but that despite growing knowledge of impact chains, we are making little progress in climate adaptation and risk management. If the widening protection gap is not narrowed down soon, we will soon run up against the hard limits of human and ecosystem adaptation in many areas. This discussion paper highlights opportunities in 2022 in the various policy forums of international climate, development, and humanitarian policy, to narrow the protection gap through Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI). The paper offers an overall view of the discourse landscape and is aimed primarily at those political and civil society actors who have so far been familiar with only parts of the debate (e.g. the negotiations on loss and damage in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process) and are interested in identifying possible synergies with other parts.