DERRIS

DERRIS – DERRIS – DisastEr Risk Reduction InSurance

Good Practices Category

Good Practices Summary

CRAM Tool to help enterprises to identify adaptation measures that they should implement to enhance resilience. CRAM Tool helped enterprises to identify adaptation measures that they should implement to enhance resilience. After trials with 30 companies in Turin, this was rolled out to more than 3.800 companies across Italy, of which more than 300 calculated their firm’s risk index.

Mitigation

The recent increase in the frequency of extreme weather events showed how the limitation of the public administration in terms of prevention and management of risks and emergencies. SMEs are extremely vulnerable to climate risks and lack adequate skills in risk assessment and risk management. In cases where risk management plans do exist, such plans rarely take weather events into consideration. Insurance companies have the know-how, the experience, and the tools to evaluate risks related to climate change and to implement specific interventions that could reduce consequent damage and losses.

Replicability/Knowledge Transfer

Among their objectives, the project aims at transferring knowledge of how to assess and manage risks caused by catastrophic weather events from insurance companies to public administrations and SMEs. This would create resilient companies and boost the implementation of effective local climate change adaptation plans. Actually, the project followed a spill-over approach, starting with the involvement of a single pilot city, followed by the involvement of 10 additional cities and finally by the dissemination of the tools at national level. The project set solid basis to be replicated in terms of both public-private partnership model and outputs (tools, dissemination and communication instruments, guidance) to involve a higher number of local entities and businesses. The CRAM tool, as well as the rest of the tools developed within the project, were conceived to be easily used after the end of the project, in order to be transferred to other organisations in a wider number of cities.

Resources

The tool is available in the followjng link: https://cram.derris.eu/welcome.

After trials with 30 companies in Turin, this was rolled out to more than 3.800 companies across Italy, of which more than 300 calculated their firm’s risk index.

As it is open, it might be replicated in other territories.

Target Audience

Policy Implications

The project also aims at implementing innovative forms of public-private governance for climate catastrophes, involving SMEs, public administrations and insurance companies. These would be consistent with European guidelines (the EU Adaptation Strategy and Green Paper on the insurance of natural and man-made disasters) and favour the regulatory approach already undertaken by several European countries.

Social Dimension

The main benefit obtained is a growing awareness on climate change and adaptation issues within a number of targets: businesses that got information on the project (e.g. 30 SMEs involved in the pilot experiment in Turin, 75 SMEs involved in the ten additional cities). Furthermore, meetings with technical experts from public institutions and the wide stakeholder engagement process with public and the main organisations from the finance and insurance sector that were set up to draw and discuss the contents of the final guidances contributed to develop a common language and know-how and a mutual understanding of the respective needs and approaches.

On the other hand, the project goal did not aim at directly creating new jobs, but rather at qualifying existing workers by increasing their knowledge and competencies on climate risk assessment and management.

Innovation Type

Awareness, Platform, Process

Innovation

The project implemented innovative forms of public-private governance for climate catastrophes involving SMEs, public authorities and insurers, consistently with the European guidelines (EU Adaptation Strategy and Green Paper on the insurance of natural and man-made disaster) and favouring the regulatory approach already undertaken by several European countries. A Public-Private Partnership (PPP) was therefore successfully implemented in 11 Italian cities (where the public-private partnership was formalised with a memorandum of understanding). This PPP was at the core of the project in all activities, including setting of the features of the CRAM tool gathering data and feedbacks from public institutions, partners and businesses.

Outcome/Barriers

The strong difficulties that were faced by the project to involve SMEs in the various participating cities (which required the activation of a widespread model of local players’ engagement of) led to a result that appears to be below initial objectives in terms of SMEs involved by the end of the project (75 SMEs in Action E3 against 200 in the initial project). However, it is worth underlying that by the end of the project 3,819 businesses had used the CRAM tool, 312 had calculated their risk index. Moreover the 128 CAAPs finalised with the CRAM tool by the end of the project contain around 3,700 actions of risk prevention and management and adaptation to climate change.