African Risk Capacity Group Director-General and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Ibrahima Cheikh Diong. Credit: ARC

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Sep 7 2021 (IPS)

The world faces multiple crises: climate change, extreme weather events, food security and biodiversity. For African nations, these issues are compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and epidemic outbreaks that include Rift Valley Fever and Malaria. With 35 African Union Member States as signatories to its establishment Treaty, the African Risk Capacity (ARC) Group – comprising of ARC Agency and ARC Limited – works with Governments to help improve their capacities to better plan, prepare, and respond to extreme weather disasters and natural disasters.

By building smart partnerships and promoting an anticipatory financing approach, ARC enables countries to strengthen their disaster risk management systems and access rapid and predictable financing when disaster strikes to protect the food security and livelihoods of their vulnerable populations.

Since 2014, the Group, through its commercial affiliate, ARC Limited, has provided USD $720 million in risk coverage against drought and made over USD $65 million in payouts to enable an early response to these extreme weather events thereby protecting 65 million people in participating Member States. Being demand-driven in its products offering, the Group has recently diversified its offerings to include Tropical Cyclone and is currently finalizing the development of a Floods product. This is in addition to its ongoing work in Outbreaks and Epidemics targeting four pathogens including Ebola, Marburg, Meningitis and Lassa Fever. The development of a Flood Risk Model is in an advanced stage in collaboration with the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to ensure that it is offered as a world-class tool for building Member State resilience.

As the United Nations gears up for the September 23 Food Systems Summit – a crucial event that seeks to secure action to transform food production, packaging and distribution, as well as provide solutions to the climate, biodiversity and hunger crises, tackling the threat of drought will be a cornerstone of the discussions. 

In this regard, ARC is ahead of the curve. Using its cutting-edge tool, the Africa RiskView, the Group provides season monitoring, and early warning services to decision-makers on the likely impacts of natural hazards profiled for their countries. This software also estimates the impact of a disaster, estimating the number of people affected, and the associated response costs. It is, therefore, an important tool in enabling the ARC mandate of helping governments proactively manage disaster events and tackle food insecurity.

“The model ensures that governments, using data sets and information, are able to anticipate the probability of a drought or a tropical cyclone event, therefore enabling early-action to protect lives and livelihoods of communities at risk”, ARC Group Director-General and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Ibrahima Cheikh Diong told IPS.

He also added that “we are also looking at extreme weather conditions and exploring the possibility of raising money from capital markets in order to avail additional financing for adaptation or mitigation as well”.

The ARC Group Director-General is scheduled to speak on food systems transformation during the United Nations General Assembly. He hopes to steer the discussion away from a singular focus on food reserves and urge the world to explore options to provide additional financial resources to African countries to help them directly address food security and sustainable livelihoods.

“If we look at African countries, many are heavily dependent on rain-fed agriculture – I’d say almost 80 percent. Some farmers tend to be quite exposed to the lack of rain, or too much rain in some cases, and this creates additional risk among smallholder farmers.”

“In addition to having some solid irrigation systems to ensure more controlled agriculture, it is equally important to consider parametric insurance, as an innovative risk transfer mechanism to help Africa to be more resilient.”

By participating in ARC risk pools, Member States have access to rapid liquidity in the immediate aftermath of a severe insured disaster. This is critical in not only enabling response but in complementing food reserves.

The ARC business model is multi-dimensional, providing technical assistance through early warning and contingency planning tools, as well as risk transfer services. Such an approach relies heavily on innovative science and research and development, enabling a tailored offering to meet the needs of member states and the climate realities of each.

“It’s not just about the product that we offer from a research and development perspective. It is also about making sure that once the offer is clearly defined, we are able to provide the necessary capacity building to our Member States, so they are empowered with the skills and knowledge required to deal with natural disasters,” Diong said.

“Given the fiscal constraints faced by many African governments, one of our key initiatives has been the mobilisation of resources to provide premium support to countries in need of financial assistance. Accessing this funding allows countries to increase their coverage and be able to reach more people in the event of a disaster.”

As the risk insurer prepares to launch its Outbreaks and Epidemics product to the market, it is excited to be able to provide African countries with disease outbreaks early warning systems and response. The continent continues to suffer from outbreaks such as the Ebola Virus, Meningitis and Malaria.

ARC is also supporting efforts towards the first COVID-19 vaccine manufactured in Africa.

“As an institution, we are not involved in the manufacturing of vaccines, but we are in advanced discussion with an institution in Senegal called the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, which is trying to manufacture vaccines, not only for Senegal but for Africa as a whole,” said Diong. “We are partnering with them by making sure that we can provide the necessary capacity building as they produce a vaccine which will go a long way in protecting the vulnerable communities in our Member States.”

Acutely aware that women are disproportionately impacted by climate change and disasters, Diong confirms that the Group’s activities are grounded on gender equality. As such, ARC has dedicated resources and training staff in gender mainstreaming and ensuring that the ARC programme always considers the gender perspective. Recently, the Group, together with the African Union, launched a Gender Disaster Risk Management platform that focuses on sustained advocacy and the importance of research & development, training, policy dialogue, resource mobilisation and knowledge management to advance gender in Disaster Risk Management in Africa.

Lastly, “I think the message I want to convey is that Africa is not lagging behind. Disasters do not discriminate. It is important to anticipate disasters as this allows each nation to come up with necessary measures and mechanisms to deal with disasters before they occur,” Diong told IPS. “As an organisation, together with partners, we are on a journey to ensure that we can make Africa more resilient, be able to adapt to the impacts of climate change and mitigate the damages caused.”

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By Hazel Henderson
MIAMI, Florida, Nov 17 2015 (IPS)

We humans are acutely aware of risks. From our earliest times, the risks we faced were from hunger, predatory animals, extreme environmental conditions and, as our numbers grew, from other human tribes.

Hazel Henderson

Today, in the 21st century, new risks dominate our political and social issues from terrorism, barbarous attacks on civilians as in Paris, nuclear meltdowns and weapons, financial crises, desertification and famines, disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica, water shortages, polluted air, rising sea levels, new pandemics and drug-resistant diseases.

Yet views about these risks and priorities in addressing them are all over the map. This disparity is largely due to different views on how these new risks arose, who is to blame (since they are mostly humanly self-inflicted). This underlying debate about causes of today’s risks still hampers agreement on how to address let alone solve them or mitigate their effects.

Take the view of risk prevalent in the global financial system and its millions of traders in London, Wall Street, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Shanghai. They focus on risks to corporate earnings and profitability, interest rate risk, weak GDP growth, volatile gasoline prices, grassroots opposition, government regulation, political demands for rising wages, democratic demands to reduce inequality.

I attended a conference on “Playing for the Long-term” in New York, November, 3, 2015, hosted by the New York Times convening some 500 Wall Streeters. Their views focused on these risks, as well as those disrupting finance posed by the incursions of Silicon Valley startups threatening to bypass Wall Street: crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, cellphone banking, social media and electronic startups based on Internet platforms. Risks from cyber attacks also focused much attention. Risks from the wider world received little attention – even those now impinging on coal and oil stocks from activists divesting from fossil fuels. I asked Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman if he agreed with Bank of England head Mark Carney that many fossil fuel reserves could never be lifted or burned without further damage to the global climate and that these assets would be devalued. Mr. Gorman allowed that climate change was a problem, but that it was “not our business.”

Climate risk was hardly raised until one of the last speakers, former US Vice President Al Gore, explained how his London-based investment firm Generation Investment Management had produced healthy financial returns on $10 billion dollars of client assets by investing beyond fossil fuels in the more efficient, knowledge-rich technologies of renewable energy companies and the growing next economy: the Solar Age. Unfortunately for the rest of us, financial players like economists see risk in terms of money – forgetting that currencies are simply units of account which track and keep score of human transactions and interactions with nature’s resources.

So it still seems a question of “What risks?” – where and how they arise. How can we come together to share responsibility for our common future on this planet, powered daily by free energy from the Sun? As the beleaguered beautiful city of Paris prepares to host the UN Climate Summit from November 30 to December 11, 2015, even the world’s scientists of the Convention on Climate Change find their assessments of climate risk challenged not only by those denying that humans caused it, but that their models under-estimated these risks.

A UNEP Emissions Gap Report assessed the 119 Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) October 2015, covering 88 per cent of global GHG emissions in 2012. This indicates these efforts could cut up to 11 gigatons of CO2 equivalents from projected emissions by 2030. But, this is only half of the total required if there is a chance of staying below the target of below 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said that these INDC levels are an increase in ambition levels but not sufficient to reach this 2C target.

Several scientists warn that sea level rises are now inevitable due to long feedback processes measured by Earth-observing satellites. These risks focus on melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, reported by scientists James Hanson, Erick Riguot, Richard Alley, Andrea Dutton, John Englander and others. David Wasdell, director of the London-based Meridian Programme, critiques the official IPCC report’s Summary for Policy Makers for downplaying the risks for political and economic expediency. Wasdell’s Climate Dynamics: Facing the Harsh Realities of Now (September 2015) concludes that human greenhouse gases already emitted, moving heat through Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, have already exceeded the 2C target and notional “available carbon budget.” Wasdell’s report concludes that any notional carbon budget allowing further emissions has already collapsed and we face a carbon debt instead.

Are these new climate risks insurmountable? Most experts say that there is time, but it is fast running out.

The good news is that more decision-makers and citizens in all sectors have ended their focus on fossil fuels and now recognize that our planet has always been amply powered by the Sun’s daily shower of free photons. Atmospheric CO2 can be returned to soils, deserts can be greened and ecosystems regenerated as finance is redirected by the 2° Investing Initiative. We humans have all the technology we need to scale up the next economy of efficient renewable resource technologies, as we track in our Green Transition Scoreboard® currently showing 6.22 trillion dollars of private investments in these Solar Age companies and technologies.

Risks also offer opportunities, and stress is evolution’s tool. Breakdowns drive breakthroughs!

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