Flood Risk Management: Leveraging Finance for Business Resilience in Malaysia (English)

Building resilience to natural disasters is imperative for sustainable private sector development and growth in Malaysia. Floods have been Malaysia's most frequent natural disaster, accounting for 85 percent of all natural disasters since 2000. This report looks holistically at the challenges of adaptation to climate change for businesses, exploring the complementarity among the public sector, the financial sector, and the private sector efforts in managing flood risks. It does so by using a range of complementary analyses that bring together the private sector perspective drawn from a firm-level survey, the financial sector perspective based on a survey of financial institutions (both banks and insurers and takaful operators), along with macro-modelling estimates of the aggregate impacts of future floods. The report concludes with a roadmap for policy action to strengthen private sector resilience and enhance the management of flood risks for businesses, zooming in on policies for the financial sector.