## Opening Remarks by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva at the Insurance Development Forum Summit

_IMF News, June 7, 2021_

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## Bibliographic details
- Published: June 7, 2021

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### Overview
- Remarks delivered on June 7, 2021.
- Core IMF mandate referenced: promoting macroeconomic and financial stability, growth and employment.
- Three focal areas addressed:
  - Building resilience to climate shocks and accelerating the transition to the new climate economy.
  - Identifying and managing climate-related financial risks for the insurance industry.
  - Unlocking the potential of the insurance industry as a source of financing in the climate transformation.

### Building resilience
- Insurance industry credited with advances in climate risk monitoring, modeling, and integration of those risks into insurance products.
- IMF engagement:
  - Deepening understanding of climate risks and ways to reduce them.
  - Integrating insurance industry risk assessment into IMF work, including regular country assessments and financial sector assessments (FSAPs).
  - Supporting countries to develop and adopt forward-leaning insurance products and expand insurance coverage for sovereigns, businesses, and households.

### Making insurers more resilient
- Key enablers: high-quality disclosure standards, improved data, and stress-testing for climate-related risks.
- Governance and reporting:
  - Support noted for the G7 agreement to move towards mandatory disclosure of climate-related risks and to standardize reporting.
  - Observation that there remain some 200 frameworks for reporting; aim is to standardize reporting by COP26.
- IMF operational steps:
  - Move to stress-testing for climate-related risks.
  - Integrate standardized reporting into FSAPs.
  - Current FSAP coverage and targets:
    - FSAPs cover some 12 countries per year.
    - Climate-related risks have been included in one in five of these assessments.
    - Goal to move to full coverage within 18 months.

### Insurance money for green finance
- Research finding cited: a green infrastructure push—coordinated across economies—can boost global GDP in the next 15 years by 0.7 percent per year and create millions of new jobs.
- Barriers to insurer investment in emerging and developing economies:
  - Prohibitions or very tight limits on insurer investment in infrastructure projects.
  - Capital requirements that often overestimate the risks of such investments.
- Policy implications:
  - Reducing regulatory barriers and reflecting risks more accurately can be a global game changer for mobilizing insurance capital into green infrastructure.

### IMF commitments and collaboration
- IMF seeks to work with the insurance industry to:
  - Share best practices on risk assessment and resilience-building.
  - Support expansion of insurance coverage at sovereign, business, and household levels.
  - Advance policies to reduce barriers to insurer investment in infrastructure and improve risk calibration in regulation.
- Emphasis on collective action: accelerating the transition to a greener and more resilient economy requires coordinated efforts among institutions and the financial sector.

*Source: Opening Remarks by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva at the Insurance Development Forum Summit (June 7, 2021).*

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## References

- [https://www.imf.org/en/about/senior-officials/bios/kristalina-georgieva](https://www.imf.org/en/about/senior-officials/bios/kristalina-georgieva)
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_Source: https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2021/06/10/sp060721-opening-remarks-at-the-insurance-development-forum-summit_