From Disaster to Development: Finance Provides a Platform to Empower Technology for Resilience to Climate Change

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction emphasizes four principles: understanding risk; strengthening governance; investing in resilience; and building back better. Parametric insurance, offered to nations, provides a financial platform to pool and transfer risk from the regional to the global marketplace. The Caribbean Ocean Assets Sustainability faciliTy (COAST) expands upon the prior success of parametric insurance by providing a new platform to more fully link policy and technology with the aim of increasing disaster resilience. COAST focuses upon the nexus among food and nutrition security, the health of the ocean, and the occurrence of severe weather in the Caribbean Sea. The benefits of COAST - linking the technologies highlighted in the Climate-Smart Agriculture Sourcebook and the goals of the Caribbean Community Common Fisheries Policy - are examined using ghost fishing and spiny lobster as an example. This study points to the potential of using finance to provide a platform to empower technology to increase resilience in the face of a changing climate.