Financial Investments for Infrastructure Resilience as Potentially Influencing Insurance Related to Extreme Events

Authors

Rae Zimmerman - NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Body

Infrastructures that provide key public services are known targets of weather and climate related disasters. These services affect the ability of homeowners and businesses to recover from disasters. The purpose of the presentation is to address how financing of infrastructure investments from public and private sources other than insurance is a key factor in understanding the role of insurance in supplementing these other financing mechanisms. The methodology first presents examples of and variations in financing patterns and trends for two types of infrastructure, traditional and newer green infrastructures. Second, an analysis of financing characteristics of a selected set of about 400 green infrastructure cases throughout the U.S. is presented to provide more detail on financial investment variations, including geographic variations. In addition, disaster or emergency financing in preparation for, responding to, and recovering from disasters is compared to traditional financing mechanisms used for infrastructure in general. The analysis of the green infrastructure cases includes parameters such as costs, technologies, and sizes. Conclusions for the case analysis point to a substantial variation in these factors across the cases. The preliminary findings indicate a need for refinement in definitions and protocols for characterizing these infrastructures. Finally, these financial investment approaches to infrastructure, that is, traditional vs. newer infrastructure and disaster funding vs. conventional funding, are discussed in terms of how they relate to insurance by providing additional resources that potentially could influence the design of insurance mechanisms.
Keywords:Infrastructure Investment, green infrastructure, traditional infrastructure, disaster financing, traditional infrastructure financing

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