23 April, 2025 – If you are reporting on the 2025 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group (WBG) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), taking place from April 21 to 26, in Washington, D.C, please consider the following comment from Daniel Clarke, Executive Director, the Centre for Disaster Protection.
“As global leaders gather in Washington, D.C. for the 2025 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and IMF, they are being urged to confront a hard truth: without tackling disaster risk, development goals remain out of reach.
Disasters undo economic progress and deepen poverty. Yet in 2022, of the $76 billion spent on crisis finance, less than 2% was pre-arranged – and only a fraction of that reached low-income countries. The World Bank’s expanded crisis toolkit is a step forward, but more must be done to move pre-arranged finance from the margins to the mainstream.
The High-Level Panel on Closing the Crisis Protection Gap has called for a tenfold increase in pre-arranged finance by 2035. The Spring Meetings are a critical moment to align leadership, tools, and investment behind this goal – and make faster, more predictable crisis finance the norm, not the exception.”
– Daniel Clarke, Executive Director, Centre for Disaster Protection
