With humanitarian finance under strain, it’s crucial to rethink liquidity. A new piece from the International Financing Review by Julian Lewis underscores a growing crisis: traditional aid flows are shrinking, leaving humanitarian actors struggling to meet escalating needs. The liquidity challenge is real but so is the opportunity to innovate.

The Humanitarian Finance Forum’s Simon Meldrum explains how the insurance industry can help to tackle the humanitarian crisis caused by climate change.

Governments use so-called parametric insurance to insure against specific named events. But this insurance has limits: insuring against a specific parameter or trigger event means leaving out everything not specified or not – quite – severe enough. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' solution to this problem is a first in the humanitarian sector: an innovative, indemnity insurance policy that insures the pot itself.

Donors are lagging as wars and climate change push global aid needs to record highs, with vulnerable groups hit by the cash crisis.