Paula Jarzabkowski

Background

About Paula Jarzabkowski

Areas of expertise- The insurance protection gap for disasters, including terrorism, earthquakes, and extreme-weather events such as bushfires, hurricanes and floods- Financial protection for, and resilience to, disaster in both advanced and developing economies - Insurance markets as underpinning the economy, including mortgages, credit and lending I am an expert in the public-private mechanisms proliferating around the world to address the insurance protection gap. The insurance protection gap is the economic loss from disasters that is not insured. In advanced economies, the burden of paying for recovery from disasters then falls upon the government and taxpayers. In low-income countries, disaster recovery sets back economic gains by decades affecting the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable people. The insurance protection gap is rapidly increasing due to climate change, yet climate-driven risk is not insurable because it is systemic, meaning frequent, correlated, and severe. Global insurance markets rely on highly-diversified risks, in which premiums on many different risks pay for the losses on a few risks in any country at any one time. Climate change, be that through more severe and frequent Caribbean hurricanes, Australian floods, and European heatwaves, compounds global losses, generating a systemic effect of spiralling premiums, withdrawal of insurance, and unprotected assets that create the insurance protection gap. I research ways to increase insurance protection and integrate it with physical resilience to disaster.