Bermuda Launches Initiative To Become Climate Risk Finance Center

The Bermuda Business Development Agency (BDA), under the leadership of the Bermuda government and in collaboration with the private sector, has launched an initiative to establish and promote the jurisdiction as the world's climate risk finance capital.

The initiative aims to make climate risk finance an additional leg in Bermuda's "economic stool" and one that would be closely aligned with the other legs: reinsurance and insurance, insurance-linked securities (ILS), and professional services expertise.

"It is a natural fit for Bermuda to become a major base of operations for the global climate risk finance sector," BDA CEO Roland Andy Burrows said in a statement. "Not only do we already have many of the world's leading experts on weather-related catastrophes based here in our globally significant property catastrophe reinsurance market, we also have a financial services regulator, in the form of the Bermuda Monetary Authority, which understands the importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns."

"By extending our global reinsurance leadership to climate risk finance, Bermuda can again prove to be a collaborative partner to the world's key markets, a leading member of the worldwide family of responsible communities, playing a major role in delivering solutions to one of the most important challenges of our time," Mr. Burrows said.

A team of leaders from the Bermuda government, the BDA, and its partners have been preparing for virtual and, eventually, in-person engagements to educate capital allocators, entrepreneurs, and other key stakeholders about Bermuda's competitive advantages in climate risk finance and the opportunities the jurisdiction can provide to accelerate and support climate risk finance strategies.

"While it will be challenging and can only develop over time, we have the goal of encouraging a new economic pillar of analogous scale to reinsurance," BDA Chair Stephen Weinstein said in the statement.