Reef Resilience and Risk Financing in the Greater Caribbean

In the last decades, scientists and reef managers—as well as recreational divers and snorkelers—have begun to witness, with concern, the increasingly destructive impacts of hurricanes on coral reefs in the Caribbean region. While reefs have faced, and survived, the natural disturbances of hurricanes for eons, local stressors and global climate change-related threats amplify the risk of a hurricane impact leading to irreversible coral degradation and mortality. 

The Reef Resilience and Risk Financing in the Greater Caribbean project enhanced the capacity of local communities, governments, the private sector, and environmental funds to increase coastal resilience using innovative financing mechanisms, such as parametric reef insurance. 

The project team—made up of both regional environmental funds of the Greater Caribbean region and a global advisory firm with expertise in innovative approaches to ecosystem risk financing—enabled the diffusion of practical best practice and lessons learned in the Mesoamerican Reef (MAR) across the Greater Caribbean. This project provided additional environmental funds with access to the necessary technical expertise to develop and implement context-specific, bespoke financing mechanisms for reef resilience. The project also supported a strategic collaboration between the Mesoamerican Reef Fund (MARFund), Caribbean Biodiversity Fund (CBF), and Willis Group and Towers Watson (WTW).