Day 2: PCRIC World Café Showcases DRF Products and Services    

With 10 partner organisations contributing to the workshop, an innovative feature of Day 2 of the Pacific Regional DRF workshop was the ‘World Café’ concept. This allowed PIC representatives a welcome opportunity to engage directly with an array of specialist support providers rarely accessible in a single location. A clearly popular initiative which ran over time, numerous enquiries were initiated, reflecting the scale of interest in understanding potential pathways of support  toward strategic, effective disaster risk protection and DRF management.

A day of significant technical content, a key presentation highlighted the importance of layering risk to secure a more balanced DRF portfolio and emphasised the importance of considering the value-for-money proposition offered by various risk management instruments.

Elsewhere, participants were introduced to ADB’s innovative Disaster Risk Analytics Explorer, currently under development. This tool works to harness risk data, cutting-edge tools, advanced analytics, and collaborative expertise to deliver critical insights on the financial impacts of climate and disaster events. The tool aims to promote risk-informed decision making and support proactive disaster risk management strategies. 

The session addressing the influence of Money-Out mechanisms on the delivery of finance post-disaster proved particularly popular and resulted in a lively Q&A session. The difficulty of balancing the need for urgent dispersal of emergency funds with accountable management of Public Finance stood as a challenge yet to be resolved in many jurisdictions.

Closing out a successful Day 2 was an informative session on the progress made by various nations in establishment of formal Disbursement Plans to be implemented in the event payout of a PCRIC policy is triggered. Critical to timely on-the-ground delivery of emergency response funding post-disaster, these plans form part of the overall DRF management strategy and guide effective decision making in times of crisis.