Deeply Talks: Hedging Climate Change By Insuring Coral Reefs

Published: March 19, 2018, 3:16 p.m.

This episode of Deeply Talks is live from the Economist World Ocean Summit in Mexico! Todd Woody, News Deeply’s executive editor for environment, talks with Fernando Secaira, director of climate & risk resilience Mexico for the Nature Conservancy, Mark Way, corporate climate lead at The Nature Conservancy, about a new public-private consortium that is taking out an insurance policy on a 37-mile (60km) section of the Mesoamerican Reef off Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. We’ll talk about why the government, the tourism industry, insurer Swiss Re and the Nature Conservancy have joined forces to insure a section of the reef, how the insurance policy will help preserve the corals and whether such financial innovations could help protect imperiled coral reefs elsewhere.