Globally, poor mental health afflicts close to a billion people.1 Incidents of mental illness soared during the pandemic due to social restrictions, isolation and increased financial insecurity. The cost-of-living crisis, effects of climate change and other destabilising factors are set to exacerbate mental health risk and its impact on societies and economies.
A range of interdependent risks and individual decisions accumulate over a person’s life, shaping health and economic outcomes. This special issue of The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, edited by Joan Costa-Font (London School of Economics), Christophe Courbage, (Geneva School of Business Administration), and Nilesh Raut (London School of Economics), examines how insurance interacts with health throughout the life course and impacts incentives, behaviour, and resilience.
Insurance influences individual choices
Industrial decarbonisation requires new technologies and approaches that can deliver deep emissions reductions while maintaining competitiveness. Bringing these technologies from development to large-scale deployment often requires major, long-term investments in new infrastructure and business models, creating risks that can be difficult for individual companies or investors to bear. Insurance and financial assurance can help manage and share these risks, making decarbonisation projects more bankable and investable and enabling them to scale.
