Financing Instruments for Climate and Disaster Risk Resilience: The Role of the Private Sector

Dear Colleagues,

As climate change increases the frequency and impacts of natural disasters, it becomes increasingly important to implement innovative climate and disaster risk financing tools and instruments that can help improve financial preparedness and build community resilience to disasters.  While governments (at various levels) often play a key role in mobilising the public funding needed to respond to climate change and natural disasters, they often fail to encourage private capital flows in order to accelerate investment in climate-resilient infrastructure and tools to mitigate the impact caused by natural disasters. Several scholars have focused on the potential role of private investment to achieve climate-related objectives and call for more effective public sector mechanisms to stimulate this investment. Private investment in quality infrastructure has been found to have a positive impact on improving disaster resilience. However, large infrastructure projects often pose a variety of risks for the private sector, such as political regime changes that may affect the viability of such projects through subsidy cuts, increased regulatory barriers, and/or withdrawal of tax incentives (to name a few). Therefore, to unlock the potential of private sector investment, it is important to find effective financing tools that can help reduce the potential risk burden by sharing and transferring the risks to the public sector. While much of the existing literature examining private sector investment in climate and disaster risk financing is either theoretical and/or sector specific, in this Special Issue, we are proposing a more holistic approach to include innovative tools and country-specific case studies that can support the private sector to overcome barriers in climate and disaster risk financing. We believe that finding new tools and business cases to spur private sector investment, particularly in emerging markets, would help both policymakers and practitioners in their pursuit to improve climate and disaster risk resiliency.

This Special Issue aims to fill the void in the literature by examining the key barriers of current investment regimes in climate and disaster risk-related activities. We also aim to examine the policy regimes required to stimulate private sector investment in implementing innovative climate and disaster financing.

In this Special Issue, original research articles, case studies, and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Climate and disaster risk financing facilities;
• Engaging the private sector;
• Barriers of climate and disaster risk financing;
• Emerging markets;
• Tools to support private sector engagement;
• Policy and financial support mechanisms;
• Case studies of concessional financing;
• External risk finance (grants, loans, and other external finance);
• Public–private partnerships;
• Financing challenges for viable and environmentally sustainable agriculture;
• Green bond and sovereign risk insurance;
• Ex-ante and Ex-post financing instruments;
• Enabling environment for risk financing;
• Risk transfer, tax incentives/ subsidies;
• Capital market solutions;
• Managing climate-related financial risks;
• Role of blockchain-based tools and IT-based platforms;

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Tapan Sarker
Dr. Syed Shams
Guest Editors

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• climate finance
• disaster risk financing
• the role of private sector
• emerging economies