Biographical Notes

Dublin University Press, 2025

Lorcán Hall and Patrick Paul Walsh.

The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (“Agenda”) and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outline a shared vision for a sustainable future. It is a blueprint for how we can transform our world across the economic, social, environmental, and governance dimensions, but cascading and compounding risks and crises are obscuring this vision and impacting our collective ability to deliver urgently required change. Risk and crises are overlapping, converging, and amplifying each other, causing a polycrisis and persistent instability. Only 16 percent of the SDG targets are on track to be met globally by 2030, with the remaining 84 percent showing limited progress or a reversal of progress. One critical constraint is finance with the annual SDG financing gap standing at USD 4.2 trillion.

The Agenda is the overarching development framework, complementing the other major development strategies such as the Pact for the Future, the Paris Agreement, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. These UN multilateral development agreements repeatedly call for a whole-of-society approach and multi-stakeholder partnerships to achieve their objectives and emphasise stronger risk management and greater financial resources as transformation levers, yet we are not effectively using many tools at our disposal. One of these overlooked tools is insurance.

The insurance industry is a cornerstone of the global financial system with assets under management of USD 40 trillion, annual payouts of claims and benefits of USD 5-5.5 trillion, and liabilities of USD 36 trillion to pay future claims and benefits. Its distinctive risk management and risk transfer capabilities can play a greater role in helping households, businesses, and governments better navigate risks and crises, build resilience, and enable transformations from unsustainable to sustainable practices. However, insurance receives very little explicit attention in development agendas and frameworks. This lack of recognition stands in stark contrast to the other meaningful components of the global financial system, such as banking and investing, with these industries receiving considerable focus as drivers of change.

This qualitative Position Paper investigates why the industry’s strengths receive limited attention in UN multilateral development agreements; it explores how to mainstream discussions around risk, resilience, and insurance; and presents ways in which the public and private sectors can scale the use of insurance solutions in development efforts. 42 in-depth research interviews were conducted with senior administrators and executives with global roles across both sectors.

The synthesised findings are presented as 11 design principles with 18 actionable recommendations. These proposals do not seek to reinvent the wheel. Risk management and risk transfer solutions are already used for development purposes, but the lessons from these efforts should be deployed and mainstreamed into government policies and within multi- stakeholder partnerships, and be appropriately resourced to scale and incentivise more transformational innovations. Only then can the full potential of the industry’s distinctive capabilities be unlocked to drive transformational progress to achieve sustainable development.

This paper examines private insurance solutions, and not publicly funded social protection programmes. It intentionally excludes the roles of (re)insurance companies as institutional investors and providers of retail investment products, as these topics are regularly examined elsewhere.