|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Belgium
River flooding is a leading cause of insured loss in Belgium. In the 1990s, river flooding resulted in estimated insured losses of approximately €1 billion, and the risk of future losses is likely to increase. The RMS™ Belgium River Flood Model provides high-resolution capability to price and underwrite policies and effectively manage company-specific flood aggregates and exposure. The stochastic event set contains a wide range of possible winter and summer river flood events that cause losses both on and off the major floodplains in Belgium, with losses developed from high-resolution hazard information, and features a full-suite of Belgium-specific inundation and direct rainfall vulnerability functions. Winter floods frequently affect large areas as rain falls on saturated ground over a prolonged period, causing many rivers to inundate surrounding areas, and can cause large losses on major flood plains. By contrast, summer flooding is characterized by intense rainfall over relatively short time periods, causing significant off-floodplain flooding in addition to flooding on major rivers. The losses from a number of important recent flood events have been reconstructed using Calamity Fund loss data, including those in 1993, 1995, and 1998. RMS estimates that the insured loss from a recurrence of the flood event in September 1998 would be €300-400 million. RMS has considerable experience in the development of river flood models, having constructed and released the first high-resolution model on the market for the U.K. in 2001. The Belgium River Flood Model represents the next step in the development of RMS' pan-European river flood platform, which will feature a Europe-wide stochastic event set and will allow, for the first time, the calculation of correlated flood risk across Europe. Model Highlights
Geographic Scope Belgium Exposure data Resolution River flood risk can be analyzed at Latitude/Longitude (VRG), Four-figure Postcode, or CRESTA.
Europe has a long and complex history of seismic activity. The convergence of the Eurasian and African plates across the Mediterranean has resulted in a wide zone of collision tectonics and the formation of smaller microplates along the plate boundary zone. Seismic activity generally decreases northward away from the Mediterranean region through the Alps. North of the Alps, within the interior of the Eurasian plate, earthquakes are associated with several slowly deforming rift zones created by extensional forces.
Belgium’s Seismic Risk
Belgium lies at the northern end of the Lower Rhine Graben rift zone. Seismic activity varies across the country, with the highest risk in the south and east. Belgium has experienced several notable earthquakes in its past, although the strongest instrumentally recorded earthquake in Belgium actually occurred in the Netherlands near Roermond — the 1992 magnitude 5.3 event was widely felt across parts of Belgium and Germany. In Belgium, a magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck beneath the western suburbs of Liege in 1983, causing an estimated loss of up to US$80 million (1983 values). In 1692, an earthquake struck Verviers, Belgium, causing widespread damage from Kent, England to Champagne, France. Underwriting and managing earthquake insurance in this environment is a complex undertaking. Released in 2007, the RMS® Europe Earthquake Model helps insurers and reinsurers in this task by quantifying risk across various regions and a wide variety of construction types. Model Highlights
Geographic Scope All of Belgium Exposure data Resolution Data input supported at the following levels of resolution: latitude/longitude, street address, street name, postal code, city, commune, and CRESTA zone Related Models
Geographic Scope HailCalc Europe covers the following eight countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Exposure Data Resolution HailCalc Europe incorporates a different geocoding
technique than that used by the RMS models. For all modeled countries,
only exposure data aggregated to CRESTA - or country-level is supported.
During data import, HailCalc Europe disaggregates the imported exposure
onto a 3 km-by-3 km grid using inventory maps developed with Swiss Re.
The loss calculations are performed at this grid level resolution and
are re-aggregated for output.
Since 1996, RMS has continually developed state-of-the-art databases and associated methodologies to quantify Europe Windstorm risk. The RMS® Europe Windstorm Model includes a comprehensive suite of wind events enabling loss calculations both from large-scale extra-tropical winter-storms, such as windstorms Anatol, Lothar, and Martin in 1999, and from smaller-scale summer thunderstorm events, such as the Birmingham Tornado in 2005. The model allows seamless modeling across 12 countries, including the effects of post-event loss amplification. Unlike regions affected by tropical cyclones, Europe has no single agency, authority, or publication that has created a comprehensive catalog of significant ETC storms over the past century. Therefore, RMS has compiled a unique catalog of more than 2,500 storms, spanning 138 years, using daily meteorological archives from many European countries and agencies, and has used statistical techniques to combine this original research with information from numerical weather models and climate models. This comprehensive blend of techniques and data sources has been woven together in a long-term simulation of possible windstorm events with realistic tracks, frequency and severity distributions, which are essential for a fully probabilistic assessment of windstorm risk. Incorporating vulnerability functions calibrated against volumes of historical insured claims data, and integrating them within the framework of the RMS financial model has resulted in a comprehensive, state-of-the-art catastrophe model. The RMS Europe Windstorm Model is used by major European insurers, leading reinsurers in all major global markets, and capital market constituents in the development of alternative risk transfer securities. Model Highlights
Geographic Scope The RMS Europe Windstorm Model covers the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Exposure Data Resolution The RMS Europe Windstorm Model supports analyses at
the following geographic resolution in each country:
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
Home Contact Us Site Help Privacy Policy Terms of Use Legal ©1999-2009 Risk Management Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
Extra-tropical
cyclone (ETC) risk in Northern Europe is one of the most complex
climatic phenomena in the world to model. The generally swift moving,
broad-reaching storms affect wide areas with relatively low-levels of
damage at individual sites compared to their tropical counterparts.
However, due to their breadth and relatively high frequency of
occurrence, losses can accumulate to extraordinary levels in any given
year. The most exposed area to high windspeeds from ETCs is the western
edge of Europe, particularly Ireland and Britain, while other parts of
Europe, particularly to the south and east in Austria and Switzerland,
are exposed to relatively frequent damaging winds from summer
thunderstorms.