Quantitative and Financial Aspects of Resilience Bonds in the Context of Recursive Insurance Contracts. A Cost Benefit Analysis

Abstract

Abstract It is now well known that the world community must share the risks and hazards deriving from climate change and, more generally, from the environment. At the end of summer 2019, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) issued the World’s first dedicated climate resilience bond and this confirms the thesis according to which financial, social and economic instruments are always most necessary for the development of society and to avoid that natural hazards can, as occurred in the past, cause extremely heavy damage with negative repercussions on every single area of a community. Starting from the characteristics of resilience bonds and reinsurance, the paper seeks to highlight the potential advantages that would derive from a systematic application of recursive contractual instruments (smart contracts). The authors focused on the study of the projection of financial and quantitative data of resilience and catastrophe bonds on the basis of a determined timeline, a fixed insurance premium, mitigation works related and connected to the main contract (insurance). In particular, the study concerns the correlation of the urban implementation of risk mitigation works with the specific catastrophic flood risk. The paper implements a purely economic and social cost-benefit analysis (ACB) in the sense that includes, among others, a public approach and the goal of maximizing social welfare, according to efficiency economic criteria. In a nutshell, the authors highlight as the main result not only the possibility, but also the convenience of the joint and multidisciplinary application of the quantitative method (resilience bonds) to infrastructure resilience.