Frequently Asked Questions

The V20 Sustainable Insurance Facility (V20-SIF) is a project pipeline facility created to support the development and availability of climate-smart blended finance solutions for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in climate-vulnerable nations.

The Vulnerable Twenty (V20) Group was established with the inaugural meeting of the V20 Ministers of Finance of the Climate Vulnerable Forum in 2015. They are a dedicated cooperation initiative of economies systemically vulnerable to climate change which work through dialogue and action to tackle global climate change. The V20 was originally established to represent 20 of the world’s most climate vulnerable economies, but due to advancing climate change, has now grown to include 74 nations globally. To learn more about the V20, click here.

The V20-SIF was formed by the United Nations under the Principles for Sustainable Insurance in collaboration with the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative in response to the needs identified by the V20 Secretariat.

The V20-SIF has a broad range of partners and stakeholders which encompass global governments, NGOs, national banks, and private industry. These partner and stakeholder organisations support the V20-SIF with funding, organisational support, and programmatic support.

They include:

  • The United Nations, UNEP FI
  • The V20
  • BMZ, Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (Germany)
  • The Munich Climate Insurance Initiative
  • The African Development Bank Group
  • The Global Shield Against Climate Risks

    • MSMEs represent more than 70% of livelihoods and contribute 30–40% of GDP in V20 nations. However, they often operate on thin profit margins, face climate risks alone, and lack the resources or financial protection needed to recover from climate shocks—placing both individual businesses and entire economies at risk.

    As climate-related disasters grow in frequency and severity, MSMEs are increasingly exposed to long-term business interruption, property damage, and income loss. Most do not have insurance or access to affordable risk financing, leaving them financially vulnerable and at risk of permanent closure after extreme events.

    The V20-SIF has identified that whilst MSMEs tend to fall below the threshold for accessing financial products for supporting climate-resilience, they are often combined within the business portfolios of a broad range of financial organisations, including banks and micro-finance institutions, amongst others. This provides the opportunity to assess the MSMEs therein as a collective whole.

    These organisations which have investments and relationships with multiple MSMEs face an aggregation of their individual risks, but also an aggregation of their individual industry demand. As such, we term these financial organisations as “Demand Aggregators”.

    The 100-Banks Initiative is the V20-SIF’s key strategy for innovating climate-resilience finance for V20 Nations. The initiative intends to provide direct technical assistance to 100 financial institutions in V20 nations over the course of 5 years from 2025- 20230. The initiative intends to work with banks, micro-finance institutions, and other financial organisations in assessing the aggregated climate risk across their MSME portfolios and developing tailored blended-financial packages for risk mitigation, including such products as adaptation loans and climate insurance solutions.

    For more information on the V20-SIF please contact psi-v20-sif@unepfi.org