The goal of this investment into the coverage is to help to ensure the poor will be protected against changing weather patterns.
President Barack Obama recently announced that the United States would be contributing $30 million toward coverage from climate risk insurance programs throughout the Pacific, Central America and Africa.
The announcement was made by the president while he attended a meeting in Paris with small island nation leaders.
The U.S. Department of State added to the president’s announcement by explaining that these funds are a component of a larger action strategy designed to assist vulnerable people to be able to better cope with the impact of climate change. While this does start with climate risk insurance, it will also involve the generation of climate data, services and tools, while working additional climate change related considerations into the creation of assistance programs.
This climate risk insurance funding will boost the level of coverage available to those who will be most heavily affected.
This will be specifically aimed at areas where the extreme climate related problems will be greatest. These could involve storms and flooding, drought, rising seas and melting glaciers.
According to the chief negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Amjad Abdulla, from the Maldives, the members of AOSIS are already experiencing higher tides, storm surges and shore erosion. He responded to President Obama’s announcement by saying that the climate change insurance funding was a “sign of progress” within the Paris U.N. climate summit. In a statement, Abdulla added that “We now encourage our partners to recognize the full scale of the challenge we face and help us tackle it together.”
The assistance from the United States is also seen as progress toward one of the goals that the G7 leaders established over the summer of 2015, when they said they would boost their assistance by up to 400 million people by the close of 2020. This represents the number of people estimated to be at greatest risk of the impact of climate change within developing nations. The goal is to provide them with access to climate risk insurance in order to be able to cope with those potential damages.
