How do you get money to a flood-hit city at the time of greatest need? That question drives the work of Karina Whalley, head of public sector at AXA Climate, the adaptation arm of the global insurer, who recently spoke with Linda-Eling Lee, the MSCI Institute’s founding director.

Whalley’s team models and quantifies climate risk, finds the most cost-efficient ways to reduce it through adaptation, and structures insurance for the risk that remains. Their core expertise is parametric cover, co-designed with cities, governments, banks and humanitarian organizations. “Payouts are triggered by objective hazards,” she explains, “like wind speed for a hurricane or the level of rainfall for drought.”

The newest example is in Lagos, home to some 17 million people, where flooding is an ongoing challenge. A newly launched policy for the city’s government uses satellite imagery of flood footprints, overlaid with maps of vulnerable communities, to trigger fast payouts to emergency services. “It’s a way for them to increase their budget when they need it most,” she says. The logic is pre-arranged financing that moves money immediately, reducing the overall cost of the disaster.

Similar covers are already running in Senegal, Togo and South Africa, and Whalley is pushing to scale them. As co-chair of the Insurance Development Forum’s sovereign and humanitarian solutions working group, she has helped build open-source risk models for emerging economies and a fund through which seven insurers back climate-resilient infrastructure with blended finance from IFC. “Everyone has a part to play,” she says. “The proof of concept is already there.”