Webinar: Insurance Solutions as a Means to Finance Wetland Restoration – Event Recap
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Global Europe
Wetlands play a crucial role in disaster risk reduction by acting as natural buffers against extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and storms. Recognizing this, on January 30, 2025, Wetlands International Europe, in collaboration with the NATURANCE project, hosted a webinar titled “Insurance solutions as a means to finance wetland restoration” ahead of World Wetlands Day. The event highlighted the importance of wetlands in mitigating natural hazards and explored innovative financial mechanisms, particularly the role of the insurance sector, in supporting their conservation and restoration for a more resilient future.
The webinar featured insights from experts at UNESCO, UNEP Finance Initiative, CIREF, and NATURANCE.
Dr Chris Baker, Director of Wetlands International Europe, opened the session by emphasizing the importance of wetlands in maintaining biodiversity, regulating water cycles, and mitigating natural disasters such as floods, storms, and droughts. His remarks resonated with the theme of World Wetlands Day 2025, “Protecting Wetlands for Our Common Future,” highlighting the critical role these ecosystems play in ensuring a sustainable and resilient future for all.
Irina Pavlova, Project Officer at UNESCO Liaison Office to the EU, then presented UNESCO’s approach to nature-based solutions (Nbs). She discussed the existing overlap between more than a 100 Ramsar sites and UNESCO Biosphere reserves, where UNESCO acts through advocacy, knowledge development and capacity building. UNESCO supports the development ecosystem-based disaster risk-reduction notably through ongoing or past projects such as NBS INFRA or OPERANDUM.
Aniela Stachnik Perez, Project Officer at CIREF, introduced the SpongeBoost project, aiming to identify effective ways to enhance or restore landscapes’ natural water retention capacity. By consolidating existing knowledge, utilizing best practices, and testing innovative approaches, the project aims to create a roadmap for implementing transformative measures to improve resilience to extreme events. This involves synthesizing information for policy-making, practical restoration, and land-use planning, as well as showcasing successful examples of sponge restoration and its multiple benefits for similar projects at landscape scale, covering large areas, to be upscaled and widely implemented, it will be crucial to adopt a whole-of-society approach and ensure effective mobilization of private and public funding.
Verena Kraus, Project Manager of the within UNEP FI’s Nature Team, kindly introduced the , highlighting the role the insurance industry can play to contribute to a nature-positive future. The guide also explores the dual role and responsibilities of insurers, both enablers of economic activities, addressing nature related issues including negative externalities such as nature loss, while also managing and addressing emerging risks resulting from nature loss and absorbing financial chocs to communities and economies.
The UNEP FI Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI), launched in 2012 and mobilizing around 300 members globally, serve as a global framework for the insurance industry to address environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities.
Finally, Stefano Ceolotto, working with the NATURANCE project on the review of climate insurance schemes, recalled the economic value ecosystems and ecosystem services hold to better highlight the cost-effectiveness of NbS as effective hazard mitigation tools. The NATURANCE project explores how insurance can incentivize investments in nature, participating in closing the biodiversity financing gap, through innovative insurance policies specifically dedicated to protecting nature (e.g. Mesoamerican reef insurance programme or Parametric insurance connected to mangrove restoration in the Caribbean). The objective of these novel policies is to provide quick and accessible finance to restore damaged ecosystems and secure the provision of their disaster-risk reduction potential.
This webinar underscored the critical role of wetlands in mitigating natural disasters and highlighted the growing potential of the insurance sector in supporting their conservation. Through insights from experts across UNESCO, UNEP FI, CIREF, and NATURANCE, the discussion demonstrated that wetlands nature-based solutions can also be apprehended as sound financial strategies for reducing risk and enhancing resilience.
Innovative insurance mechanisms are emerging as viable tools to bridge the financing gap for wetland restoration. However, scaling up these solutions will require stronger public-private partnerships, improved risk models that account for ecosystem services and greater policy alignment. As we move forward, breaking silos and fostering collaboration between governments, insurers, conservation organizations and communities will be essential to ensure that wetlands continue to protect people and economies from the imminent threats of climate change.
By embracing these financial innovations, we can unlock new pathways for wetland restoration, securing their role as natural buffers and safeguarding biodiversity for future generations.
For those who could not attend the live session, the webinar’s recording and presentation slides are now available below.
Webinar recording:
