After the High Level Opening Remarks, the first session will discuss the financial impacts of COVID-19 on businesses of different sizes across various sectors, the different approaches taken to manage the impacts of this crisis and options for protecting against this risk in the future.

After the Keynote adress "a policy and research agenda for building insurability", the second session will outline some of the challenges to providing insurance coverage for pandemic-related business interruption losses, including the challenges in quantifying future pandemic risk, the magnitude of potential losses and the inability to diversify a risk that is correlated at a global level.

The Keynote address "The European policy perspective" will be followed by Session 3 "Is insurance the right option?" Insurance is only one of approach to providing financial protection against the business disruption that results from a global pandemic. Governments have provided significant support to businesses in the context of COVID-19. This session will examine the different financing options for governments in providing support to businesses in the context of a pandemic from a public financial management perspective.

In addition to providing financial protection, insurance can play an important role in supporting risk management and risk reduction. This session will discuss some of the ways in which insurance can play a broader role in supporting resilience against pandemic risk, including based on experience with other catastrophe perils.

This session will discuss some of the options for building greater resilience (operational and financial) to future pandemics in terms of improved capacity to model the frequency and severity of infectious disease outbreaks, manage their impacts on public health systems and finance their consequences.

After the Keynote address "The US policy perspective", we will proceed to the Closing session