EXPOSURE
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Insurance: The next 10 years
Mohsen Rahnama, Cihan Biyikoglu and Moe Khosravy of RMS look to 2029, consider the…
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The Value of Defense
Current flood defenses in the U.K. reduce annual losses from river flooding by £1.1 billion, according to research by RMS Flooding is one of the most significant natural hazards for the U.K. with over five million homes and businesses in England at risk of flooding and coastal erosion, according to the Environment Agency. Flood barrier in Shropshire, England In 2015, the U.K. government announced a six-year, £2.3 billion investment in flood defenses. But the Environment Agency proposes a further annual investment of £1 billion through 2065 to keep pace with the flood-related impacts of climate change and shifts in exposure levels. Critical to targeted flood mitigation investment is understanding the positive impacts of current defenses. In June 2019, Flood Re* released its Investing in Flood Risk Management and Defenses study, conducted by RMS. Addressing the financial benefits of existing flood defenses for the first time, data from the RMS® Europe Inland Flood HD Model demonstrated that current infrastructure reduced annual losses from riverine flooding by £1.1 billion. This was based on ground-up losses, using the RMS U.K. Economic Exposure Database covering buildings and contents for residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural, plus business interruption losses. Critical to targeted flood investment is understanding the positive impacts of current defenses “Our flood model incorporates countrywide defense data sourced from the Environment Agency and the Scottish Flood Defence Asset Database,” says Theresa Lederer, a consultant within the RMS capital and resilience solutions team, “including walls, levees and embankments, carefully reviewed and augmented by RMS experts. Our initial model run was with defenses in place, and then, using the in-built model functionality to enter user-defined defense values, we removed these [defenses in place].” The differences in average annual loss results between the two analyses was £1.1 billion, with losses increasing from £0.7 billion under current defenses to £1.8 billion in the undefended case. The analysis also revealed a differentiated picture of flood risk and defenses at the regional and local levels. “The savings relative to total inland flood risk are more pronounced in Northern Ireland and England (both over a 50 percent reduction in average annual losses) than Scotland and Wales,” she explains. “But when you view the savings relative to surface-water flood risk only, these are similarly significant across the country, with loss reductions exceeding 75 percent in all regions. This reflects the fact that pluvial flooding, which is kept constant in the analysis, is a bigger loss driver in Scotland and Wales, compared to the rest of the U.K.” Other insights included that the more deprived half of the population — based on the U.K. Townsend Deprivation Index — benefited from 70 percent of the loss reduction. The study also showed that while absolute savings were highest for catastrophic events, the proportion of the savings compared to the overall level of loss caused by such events was less significant. “In the case of 1-in-5-year events,” Lederer says, “river flood defenses prevent approximately 70 percent of inland flood losses. For 1-in-500-year events this drops to 30 percent; however, the absolute value of those 30 percent is far higher than the absolute savings realized in a 1-in-5-year event. “Should the focus of defenses therefore be on providing protection from major flood events, with potential catastrophic impacts even though return on investment might not be as attractive given their infrequency? Or on attritional losses from more frequent events, which might realize savings more frequently but fail to protect from the most severe events? Finding a balanced, data-driven approach to flood defense investment is crucial to ensure the affordability of sustainable flood resilience.”
The Power of a Crisis
As Christchurch City Council continues to build back better, will its resilience investment pay dividends when it comes to citywide insurance cover? The Canterbury Earthquake Sequence is the largest insured event in New Zealand’s history. Between September 2010 and December 2011, four major earthquakes caused damage to approximately 168,000 residential buildings. The earthquakes spawned more than 770,000 claims for the country’s Earthquake Commission (EQC) alone, resulting in a payout of around NZ$10 billion (US$6.4 billion). The private sector absorbed almost twice that, with the Insurance Council of New Zealand putting the figure at NZ$21.4 billion (as of March 31, 2019). Christchurch Art Gallery. The city’s art gallery, for example, has been retrofitted to resist even the most severe earthquake activity. Nine years on from the initial tremors, there remain over 1,200 open property claims in the private market, while the outstanding figure for the EQC stood at some 2,600 claims in February 2018. “Dealing with the property claims was extremely challenging,” explains Raf Manji, chair of the Christchurch City Council’s Finance Committee, “not just in terms of contractual issues, but because the insurance was based on building-by-building cover. And when you’re dealing with damage to so many buildings, it is going to take a very long time to agree what that damage is.” Building Back Better The need to rebuild Christchurch presented the city with an opportunity. “As American politician Rahm Emanuel once said, ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’” says Lianne Dalziel, mayor of Christchurch. “The earthquakes provided a major opportunity to build back better and ensure we embed resilience into every aspect, from below ground up.” That commitment means that new construction, whether of above-ground assets or horizontal infrastructure, is being carried out to a level much higher than building codes dictate. “With the information, we want more informed conversations with both traditional and alternative markets about how we transfer risk more effectively” Raf Manji Christchurch City Council “We’re building to an exceptionally high standard,” states Mike Gillooly, chief resilience officer for the city. This is a relatively new public position created following Christchurch’s inclusion in the first wave of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program. “The city’s art gallery, for example, has been retrofitted to resist even the most severe earthquake activity,” Gillooly continues. But this dedication to resilience goes beyond the immediate rebuild. The council is also making resilience a core component of its long-term strategic planning. The city’s 2021-2051 infrastructure strategy, which covers the council’s investments in water supply, wastewater, stormwater, transport, parks, facilities, solid waste and communication technology for the next 30 years, will have resilience as its overarching theme. “This is the first time we are proactively building risk and resilience into our long-term planning framework,” states Dalziel. “We are developing a much deeper appreciation of risk and have spent considerable time understanding our infrastructure. We are also working toward a much more sophisticated engagement with risk at the community level.” “It’s not only about strengthening our physical infrastructure,” she continues. “It’s also about strengthening our social infrastructure.” “We are committed to promoting greater community well-being. We need to build up social capital by bringing people together to plan for an uncertain future. High levels of social capital accelerate recovery in the aftermath of a shock, while also creating greater inherent resilience to more slow-moving challenges, such as climate change and associated rising sea levels.” Dalziel is quick to stress the importance of insurance in all this. “There is a strong relationship between economic resilience and social resilience, and the role of insurance in facilitating both cannot be underestimated. The value of insurance does not simply equal the sum of claims paid — it’s as much about the financial and social well-being that it supports.” Making Resilience Pay Recently insurers across New Zealand have been shifting their appetite and premiums in high-hazard regions to be more reflective of the country’s risk profile. There has been a shift too in the council’s approach to insurance — a shift that is central to its resilience efforts, explains Manji. “Following the earthquakes, Lianne asked me to run for council. I was a former financial markets trader and she wanted someone onboard with a financial background. But when I joined, I was taken aback by the lack of risk understanding that I saw at the local government level.” One of his first steps was to set up an independently chaired audit and risk committee and introduce a new risk management framework — a model that has since been adopted by Auckland. “Through this new framework, we were able to establish a much more sophisticated view of risk,” he explains, “and we also launched a five-year program to document every single asset in place — both above and below ground. Having this granular level of exposure insight means we can assess our approach to mitigating, retaining and transferring risk from a much more data-informed position.” At present, Christchurch is conservatively insured. This is a very deliberate choice, however, and Manji is convinced of the benefits of this approach. “This excess capacity means we have headroom into which we can grow as we continue to construct new and reconstruct old assets. That’s a much stronger position to be in than having to return to the market seeking more limit when capacity may be limited. It also demonstrates a long-term commitment to the insurance market upon which you can have much more constructive, ongoing dialogue.” Data-Informed Dialogue Christchurch City Council has been making use of insurance capital for many years. It was the 2010-11 earthquakes, though, that spurred its focus on arming itself with increasingly higher-resolution data. “We’re now coming to the table each year with an ever more accurate picture of our exposure. Working with RMS, we’ve been able to significantly evolve our risk thinking based on a range of citywide loss scenarios, and to look at ways of creating a more effective balance between traditional and more innovative parametric-based solutions.” That desire for balance does not just apply to the source of Christchurch capital, but also what kinds of assets that capital covers. At present, while the council has secured coverage for 65 percent of the value of its above-ground structures, it has only managed to buy insurance to cover approximately 15 percent of its underground infrastructure. “The insurance market is not comfortable with providing cover for underground infrastructure because it tends not to be well understood or documented,” Manji continues. “Unlike most cities, however, we know exactly what is underground and just how resilient it is. With that information, we want to have more informed conversations — with both the traditional market and alternative providers of risk capital — about how we transfer this risk more effectively. Parametric-based solutions, for example, give us the opportunity to look beyond typical building replacement covers and take a bigger-picture view of what we want to achieve from our investment in risk transfer. “And whereas an indemnity-based policy is designed primarily to return you to where you were prior to the loss, parametric payouts can be deployed for what ever purpose you want. That flexibility — along with the speed and certainty of payout — is incredibly valuable.” For Gillooly, it is about becoming an increasingly sophisticated user of risk capital and engaging in ever more mature dialogue with the markets. “If we can demonstrate through the data and analytics that we understand the exposure, that we’ve quantified the risk and we’re investing in effective risk reduction, then the market needs to acknowledge these efforts in the form of increased capacity, reduced premiums or both. Data, analytics and risk insights will continue to be the key focus of our annual discussions with the London market — and will allow us to explore parametric insurance-linked securities with confidence too.”
Vulnerability: In Equal Measure
As international efforts grow to minimize the disproportionate impact of disasters on specific parts of society, EXPOSURE looks at how close public/private collaboration will be critical to moving forward There is a widely held and understandable belief that large-scale disasters are indiscriminate events. They weigh out devastation in equal measure, irrespective of the gender, age, social standing or physical ability of those impacted. The reality, however, is very different. Catastrophic events expose the various inequalities within society in horrific fashion. Women, children, the elderly, people with disabilities and those living in economically deprived areas are at much greater risk than other parts of society both during the initial disaster phase and the recovery process. Cyclone Gorky, for example, which struck Bangladesh in 1991, caused in the region of 140,000 deaths — women made up 93 percent of that colossal death toll. Similarly, in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami some 70 percent of the 250,000 fatalities were women. Looking at the disparity from an age-banded perspective, during the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake 10,000 schools collapsed resulting in the deaths of 19,000 children. Children also remain particularly vulnerable well after disasters have subsided. In 2014, a study by the University of San Francisco of death rates in the Philippines found that delayed deaths among female infants outnumbered reported typhoon deaths by 15-to-1 following an average typhoon season — a statistic widely attributed to parents prioritizing their male infants at a time of extreme financial difficulty. And this disaster disparity is not limited to developing nations as some may assume. Societal groups in developed nations can be just as exposed to a disproportionate level of risk. During the recent Camp Fire in California, figures revealed that residents in the town of Paradise aged 75 or over were 8 times more likely to die than the average for all other age bands. This age-related disparity was only marginally smaller for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Scale of the Problem These alarming statistics are now resonating at the highest levels. Growing recognition of the inequalities in disaster-related fatality ratios is now influencing global thinking on disaster response and management strategies. Most importantly, it is a central tenet of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, which demands an “all-of-society engagement and partnership” to reduce risk that encompasses those “disproportionately affected by disasters.” Yet a fundamental problem is that disaggregated data for specific vulnerable groups is not being captured for the majority of disasters. “There is a growing acknowledgment across many nations that certain groupings within society are disproportionately impacted by disasters,” explains Alison Dobbin, principal catastrophe risk modeler at RMS. “Yet the data required to get a true sense of the scale of the problem simply isn’t being utilized and disaggregated in an effective manner post-disaster. And without exploiting and building on the data that is available, we cannot gain a working understanding of how best to tackle the multiple issues that contribute to it.” The criticality of capturing disaster datasets specific to particular groups and age bands is clearly flagged in the Sendai Framework. Under the “Guiding Principles,” the document states: “Disaster risk reduction requires a multi-hazard approach and inclusive risk-informed decision-making based on the open exchange and dissemination of disaggregated data, including by sex, age and disability, as well as on easily accessible, up-to-date, comprehensible, science-based, non-sensitive risk information, complemented by traditional knowledge.” Gathering the Data Effective data capture, however, requires a consistent approach to the collection of disaggregated information across all groups — first, to understand the specific impacts of particular perils on distinct groups, and second, to generate guidance, policies and standards for preparedness and resilience that reflect the unique sensitivities. While efforts to collect and analyze aggregated data are increasing, the complexities involved in ascertaining differentiated vulnerabilities to specific groups are becoming increasingly apparent, as Nicola Howe, lead catastrophe risk modeler at RMS, explains. “We can go beyond statistics collection, and model those factors which lead to discriminative outcomes” Nicola Howe RMS “You have to remember that social vulnerability varies from place to place and is often in a state of flux,” she says. “People move, levels of equality change, lifestyles evolve and the economic conditions in specific regions fluctuate. Take gender-based vulnerabilities for example. They tend not to be as evident in societies that demonstrate stronger levels of sexual equality. “Experiences during disasters are also highly localized and specific to the particular event or peril,” she continues. “There are multiple variables that can influence the impact on specific groups. Cultural, political and economic factors are strong influencers, but other aspects such as the time of day or the particular season can also have a significant effect on outcomes.” This creates challenges, not only for attributing specific vulnerabilities to particular groups and establishing policies designed to reduce those vulnerabilities, but also for assessing the extent to which the measures are having the desired outcomes. Establishing data consistency and overcoming the complexities posed by this universal problem will require the close collaboration of all key participants. “It is imperative that governments and NGOs recognize the important part that the private sector can play in working together and converting relevant data into the targeted insight required to support effective decision-making in this area,” says Dobbin. A Collective Response At time of writing, Dobbin and Howe were preparing to join a diverse panel of speakers at the UN’s 2019 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Switzerland. This year’s convening marks the third consecutive conference at which RMS has participated. Previous events have seen Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer, and Daniel Stander, global managing director, present on the resilience dividend andrisk finance. The title of this year’s discussion is “Using Gender, Age and Disability-Responsive Data to Empower Those Left Furthest Behind.” “One of our primary aims at the event,” says Howe, “will be to demonstrate the central role that the private sector, and in our case the risk modeling community, can play in helping to bridge the data gap that exists and help promote the meaningful way in which we can contribute.” The data does, in some cases, exist and is maintained primarily by governments and NGOs in the form of census data, death certificates, survey results and general studies. “Companies such as RMS provide the capabilities to convert this raw data into actionable insight,” Dobbin says. “We model from hazard, through vulnerability and exposure, all the way to the financial loss. That means we can take the data and turn it into outputs that governments and NGOs can use to better integrate disadvantaged groups into resilience planning.” But it’s not simply about getting access to the data. It is also about working closely with these bodies to establish the questions that they need answers to. “We need to understand the specific outputs required. To this end, we are regularly having conversations with many diverse stakeholders,” adds Dobbin. While to date the analytical capabilities of the risk modeling community have not been directed at the social vulnerability issue in any significant way, RMS has worked with organizations to model human exposure levels for perils. Collaborating with the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California (WCIRB), a private, nonprofit association, RMS conducted probabilistic earthquake analysis on exposure data for more than 11 million employees. This included information about the occupation of each employee to establish potential exposure levels for workers’ compensation cover in the state. “We were able to combine human exposure data to model the impact of an earthquake, ascertaining vulnerability based on where employees were likely to be, their locations, their specific jobs, the buildings they worked in and the time of day that the event occurred,” says Howe. “We have already established that we can incorporate age and gender data into the model, so we know that our technology is capable of supporting detailed analyses of this nature on a huge scale.” She continues: “We must show where the modeling community can make a tangible difference. We bring the ability to go beyond the collection of statistics post-disaster and to model those factors that lead to such strong differences in outcomes, so that we can identify where discrimination and selective outcomes are anticipated before they actually happen in disasters. This could be through identifying where people are situated in buildings at different times of day, by gender, age, disability, etc. It could be by modeling how different people by age, gender or disability will respond to a warning of a tsunami or a storm surge. It could be by modeling evacuation protocols to demonstrate how inclusive they are.” Strengthening the Synergies A critical aspect of reducing the vulnerability of specific groups is to ensure disadvantaged elements of society become more prominent components of mitigation and response planning efforts. A more people-centered approach to disaster management was a key aspect of the forerunner to the Sendai Framework, the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015. The plan called for risk reduction practices to be more inclusive and engage a broader scope of stakeholders, including those viewed as being at higher risk. This approach is a core part of the “Guiding Principles” that underpin the Sendai Framework. It states: “Disaster risk reduction requires an all-of-society engagement and partnership. It also requires empowerment and inclusive, accessible and non-discriminatory participation, paying special attention to people disproportionately affected by disasters, especially the poorest. A gender, age, disability and cultural perspective should be integrated in all policies and practices, and women and youth leadership should be promoted.” The Framework also calls for the empowerment of women and people with disabilities, stating that enabling them “to publicly lead and promote gender equitable and universally accessible response, recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction approaches.” This is a main area of focus for the U.N. event, explains Howe. “The conference will explore how we can promote greater involvement among members of these disadvantaged groups in resilience-related discussions, because at present we are simply not capitalizing on the insight that they can provide. “Take gender for instance. We need to get the views of those disproportionately impacted by disaster involved at every stage of the discussion process so that we can ensure that we are generating gender-sensitive risk reduction strategies, that we are factoring universal design components into how we build our shelters, so women feel welcome and supported. Only then can we say we are truly recognizing the principles of the Sendai Framework.”
The Flames Burn Higher
With California experiencing two of the most devastating seasons on record in consecutive years, EXPOSURE asks whether wildfire now needs to be considered a peak peril Some of the statistics for the 2018 U.S. wildfire season appear normal. The season was a below-average year for the number of fires reported — 58,083 incidents represented only 84 percent of the 10-year average. The number of acres burned — 8,767,492 acres — was marginally above average at 132 percent. Two factors, however, made it exceptional. First, for the second consecutive year, the Great Basin experienced intense wildfire activity, with some 2.1 million acres burned — 233 percent of the 10-year average. And second, the fires destroyed 25,790 structures, with California accounting for over 23,600 of the structures destroyed, compared to a 10-year U.S. annual average of 2,701 residences, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. As of January 28, 2019, reported insured losses for the November 2018 California wildfires, which included the Camp and Woolsey Fires, were at US$11.4 billion, according to the California Department of Insurance. Add to this the insured losses of US$11.79 billion reported in January 2018 for the October and December 2017 California events, and these two consecutive wildfire seasons constitute the most devastating on record for the wildfire-exposed state. Reaching its Peak? Such colossal losses in consecutive years have sent shockwaves through the (re)insurance industry and are forcing a reassessment of wildfire’s secondary status in the peril hierarchy. According to Mark Bove, natural catastrophe solutions manager at Munich Reinsurance America, wildfire’s status needs to be elevated in highly exposed areas. “Wildfire should certainly be considered a peak peril in areas such as California and the Intermountain West,” he states, “but not for the nation as a whole.” His views are echoed by Chris Folkman, senior director of product management at RMS. “Wildfire can no longer be viewed purely as a secondary peril in these exposed territories,” he says. “Six of the top 10 fires for structural destruction have occurred in the last 10 years in the U.S., while seven of the top 10, and 10 of the top 20 most destructive wildfires in California history have occurred since 2015. The industry now needs to achieve a level of maturity with regard to wildfire that is on a par with that of hurricane or flood.” “Average ember contributions to structure damage and destruction is approximately 15 percent, but in a wind-driven event such as the Tubbs Fire this figure is much higher” Chris Folkman RMS However, he is wary about potential knee-jerk reactions to this hike in wildfire-related losses. “There is a strong parallel between the 2017-18 wildfire seasons and the 2004-05 hurricane seasons in terms of people’s gut instincts. 2004 saw four hurricanes make landfall in Florida, with K-R-W causing massive devastation in 2005. At the time, some pockets of the industry wondered out loud if parts of Florida were uninsurable. Yet the next decade was relatively benign in terms of hurricane activity. “The key is to adopt a balanced, long-term view,” thinks Folkman. “At RMS, we think that fire severity is here to stay, while the frequency of big events may remain volatile from year-to-year.” A Fundamental Re-evaluation The California losses are forcing (re)insurers to overhaul their approach to wildfire, both at the individual risk and portfolio management levels. “The 2017 and 2018 California wildfires have forced one of the biggest re-evaluations of a natural peril since Hurricane Andrew in 1992,” believes Bove. “For both California wildfire and Hurricane Andrew, the industry didn’t fully comprehend the potential loss severities. Catastrophe models were relatively new and had not gained market-wide adoption, and many organizations were not systematically monitoring and limiting large accumulation exposure in high-risk areas. As a result, the shocks to the industry were similar.” For decades, approaches to underwriting have focused on the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which represents the area where exposure and vegetation meet. However, exposure levels in these areas are increasing sharply. Combined with excessive amounts of burnable vegetation, extended wildfire seasons, and climate-change-driven increases in temperature and extreme weather conditions, these factors are combining to cause a significant hike in exposure potential for the (re)insurance industry. A recent report published in PNAS entitled “Rapid Growth of the U.S. Wildland-Urban Interface Raises Wildfire Risk” showed that between 1990 and 2010 the new WUI area increased by 72,973 square miles (189,000 square kilometers) — larger than Washington State. The report stated: “Even though the WUI occupies less than one-tenth of the land area of the conterminous United States, 43 percent of all new houses were built there, and 61 percent of all new WUI houses were built in areas that were already in the WUI in 1990 (and remain in the WUI in 2010).” “The WUI has formed a central component of how wildfire risk has been underwritten,” explains Folkman, “but you cannot simply adopt a black-and-white approach to risk selection based on properties within or outside of the zone. As recent losses, and in particular the 2017 Northern California wildfires, have shown, regions outside of the WUI zone considered low risk can still experience devastating losses.” For Bove, while focus on the WUI is appropriate, particularly given the Coffey Park disaster during the 2017 Tubbs Fire, there is not enough focus on the intermix areas. This is the area where properties are interspersed with vegetation. “In some ways, the wildfire risk to intermix communities is worse than that at the interface,” he explains. “In an intermix fire, you have both a wildfire and an urban conflagration impacting the town at the same time, while in interface locations the fire has largely transitioned to an urban fire. “In an intermix community,” he continues, “the terrain is often more challenging and limits firefighter access to the fire as well as evacuation routes for local residents. Also, many intermix locations are far from large urban centers, limiting the amount of firefighting resources immediately available to start combatting the blaze, and this increases the potential for a fire in high-wind conditions to become a significant threat. Most likely we’ll see more scrutiny and investigation of risk in intermix towns across the nation after the Camp Fire’s decimation of Paradise, California.” Rethinking Wildfire Analysis According to Folkman, the need for greater market maturity around wildfire will require a rethink of how the industry currently analyzes the exposure and the tools it uses. “Historically, the industry has relied primarily upon deterministic tools to quantify U.S. wildfire risk,” he says, “which relate overall frequency and severity of events to the presence of fuel and climate conditions, such as high winds, low moisture and high temperatures.” While such tools can prove valuable for addressing “typical” wildland fire events, such as the 2017 Thomas Fire in Southern California, their flaws have been exposed by other recent losses. Burning Wildfire at Sunset “Such tools insufficiently address major catastrophic events that occur beyond the WUI into areas of dense exposure,” explains Folkman, “such as the Tubbs Fire in Northern California in 2017. Further, the unprecedented severity of recent wildfire events has exposed the weaknesses in maintaining a historically based deterministic approach.” While the scale of the 2017-18 losses has focused (re)insurer attention on California, companies must also recognize the scope for potential catastrophic wildfire risk extends beyond the boundaries of the western U.S. “While the frequency and severity of large, damaging fires is lower outside California,” says Bove, “there are many areas where the risk is far from negligible.” While acknowledging that the broader western U.S. is seeing increased risk due to WUI expansion, he adds: “Many may be surprised that similar wildfire risk exists across most of the southeastern U.S., as well as sections of the northeastern U.S., like in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey.” As well as addressing the geographical gaps in wildfire analysis, Folkman believes the industry must also recognize the data gaps limiting their understanding. “There are a number of areas that are understated in underwriting practices currently, such as the far-ranging impacts of ember accumulations and their potential to ignite urban conflagrations, as well as vulnerability of particular structures and mitigation measures such as defensible space and fire-resistant roof coverings.” In generating its US$9 billion to US$13 billion loss estimate for the Camp and Woolsey Fires, RMS used its recently launched North America Wildfire High-Definition (HD) Models to simulate the ignition, fire spread, ember accumulations and smoke dispersion of the fires. “In assessing the contribution of embers, for example,” Folkman states, “we modeled the accumulation of embers, their wind-driven travel and their contribution to burn hazard both within and beyond the fire perimeter. Average ember contributions to structure damage and destruction is approximately 15 percent, but in a wind-driven event such as the Tubbs Fire this figure is much higher. This was a key factor in the urban conflagration in Coffey Park.” The model also provides full contiguous U.S. coverage, and includes other model innovations such as ignition and footprint simulations for 50,000 years, flexible occurrence definitions, smoke and evacuation loss across and beyond the fire perimeter, and vulnerability and mitigation measures on which RMS collaborated with the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. Smoke damage, which leads to loss from evacuation orders and contents replacement, is often overlooked in risk assessments, despite composing a tangible portion of the loss, says Folkman. “These are very high-frequency, medium-sized losses and must be considered. The Woolsey Fire saw 260,000 people evacuated, incurring hotel, meal and transport-related expenses. Add to this smoke damage, which often results in high-value contents replacement, and you have a potential sea of medium-sized claims that can contribute significantly to the overall loss.” A further data resolution challenge relates to property characteristics. While primary property attribute data is typically well captured, believes Bove, many secondary characteristics key to wildfire are either not captured or not consistently captured. “This leaves the industry overly reliant on both average model weightings and risk scoring tools. For example, information about defensible spaces, roofing and siding materials, protecting vents and soffits from ember attacks, these are just a few of the additional fields that the industry will need to start capturing to better assess wildfire risk to a property.” A Highly Complex Peril Bove is, however, conscious of the simple fact that “wildfire behavior is extremely complex and non-linear.” He continues: “While visiting Paradise, I saw properties that did everything correct with regard to wildfire mitigation but still burned and risks that did everything wrong and survived. However, mitigation efforts can improve the probability that a structure survives.” “With more data on historical fires,” Folkman concludes, “more research into mitigation measures and increasing awareness of the risk, wildfire exposure can be addressed and managed. But it requires a team mentality, with all parties — (re)insurers, homeowners, communities, policymakers and land-use planners — all playing their part.”
Pushing Back the Water
Flood Re has been tasked with creating a risk-reflective, affordable U.K. flood insurance market by 2039. Moving forward, data resolution that supports critical investment decisions will be key Millions of properties in the U.K. are exposed to some form of flood risk. While exposure levels vary massively across the country, coastal, fluvial and pluvial floods have the potential to impact most locations across the U.K. Recent flood events have dramatically demonstrated this with properties in perceived low-risk areas being nevertheless severely affected. Before the launch of Flood Re, securing affordable household cover in high-risk areas had become more challenging — and for those impacted by flooding, almost impossible. To address this problem, Flood Re — a joint U.K. Government and insurance-industry initiative — was set up in April 2016 to help ensure available, affordable cover for exposed properties. The reinsurance scheme’s immediate aim was to establish a system whereby insurers could offer competitive premiums and lower excesses to highly exposed households. To date it has achieved considerable success on this front. Of the 350,000 properties deemed at high risk, over 150,000 policies have been ceded to Flood Re. Over 60 insurance brands representing 90 percent of the U.K. home insurance market are able to cede to the scheme. Premiums for households with prior flood claims fell by more than 50 percent in most instances, and a per-claim excess of £250 per claim (as opposed to thousands of pounds) was set. While there is still work to be done, Flood Re is now an effective, albeit temporary, barrier to flood risk becoming uninsurable in high-risk parts of the U.K. However, in some respects, this success could be considered low-hanging fruit. A Temporary Solution Flood Re is intended as a temporary solution, granted with a considerable lifespan. By 2039, when the initiative terminates, it must leave behind a flood insurance market based on risk-reflective pricing that is affordable to most households. To achieve this market nirvana, it is also tasked with working to manage flood risks. According to Gary McInally, chief actuary at Flood Re, the scheme must act as a catalyst for this process. “Flood Re has a very clear remit for the longer term,” he explains. “That is to reduce the risk of flooding over time, by helping reduce the frequency with which properties flood and the impact of flooding when it does occur. Properties ought to be presenting a level of risk that is insurable in the future. It is not about removing the risk, but rather promoting the transformation of previously uninsurable properties into insurable properties for the future.” To facilitate this transition to improved property-level resilience, Flood Re will need to adopt a multifaceted approach promoting research and development, consumer education and changes to market practices to recognize the benefit. Firstly, it must assess the potential to reduce exposure levels through implementing a range of resistance (the ability to prevent flooding) and resilience (the ability to recover from flooding) measures at the property level. Second, it must promote options for how the resulting risk reduction can be reflected in reduced flood cover prices and availability requiring less support from Flood Re. According to Andy Bord, CEO of Flood Re: “There is currently almost no link between the action of individuals in protecting their properties against floods and the insurance premium which they are charged by insurers. In principle, establishing such a positive link is an attractive approach, as it would provide a direct incentive for households to invest in property-level protection. “Flood Re is building a sound evidence base by working with academics and others to quantify the benefits of such mitigation measures. We are also investigating ways the scheme can recognize the adoption of resilience measures by householders and ways we can practically support a ‘build-back-better’ approach by insurers.” Modeling Flood Resilience Multiple studies and reports have been conducted in recent years into how to reduce flood exposure levels in the U.K. However, an extensive review commissioned by Flood Re spanning over 2,000 studies and reports found that while helping to clarify potential appropriate measures, there is a clear lack of data on the suitability of any of these measures to support the needs of the insurance market. A 2014 report produced for the U.K. Environment Agency identified a series of possible packages of resistance and resilience measures. The study was based on the agency’s Long-Term Investment Scenario (LTIS) model and assessed the potential benefit of the various packages to U.K. properties at risk of flooding. The 2014 study is currently being updated by the Environment Agency, with the new study examining specific subsets based on the levels of benefit delivered. “It is not about removing the risk, but rather promoting the transformation of previously uninsurable properties into insurable properties” Gary McInally Flood Re Packages considered will encompass resistance and resilience measures spanning both active and passive components. These include: waterproof external walls, flood-resistant doors, sump pumps and concrete flooring. The effectiveness of each is being assessed at various levels of flood severity to generate depth damage curves. While the data generated will have a foundational role in helping support outcomes around flood-related investments, it is imperative that the findings of the study undergo rigorous testing, as McInally explains. “We want to promote the use of the best-available data when making decisions,” he says. “That’s why it was important to independently verify the findings of the Environment Agency study. If the findings differ from studies conducted by the insurance industry, then we should work together to understand why.” To assess the results of key elements of the study, Flood Re called upon the flood modeling capabilities of RMS, and its Europe Inland Flood High-Definition (HD) Models, which provide the most comprehensive and granular view of flood risk currently available in Europe, covering 15 countries including the U.K. The models enable the assessment of flood risk and the uncertainties associated with that risk right down to the individual property and coverage level. In addition, it provides a much longer simulation timeline, capitalizing on advances in computational power through Cloud-based computing to span 50,000 years of possible flood events across Europe, generating over 200,000 possible flood scenarios for the U.K. alone. The model also enables a much more accurate and transparent means of assessing the impact of permanent and temporary flood defenses and their role to protect against both fluvial and pluvial flood events. Putting Data to the Test “The recent advances in HD modeling have provided greater transparency and so allow us to better understand the behavior of the model in more detail than was possible previously,” McInally believes. “That is enabling us to pose much more refined questions that previously we could not address.” While the Environment Agency study provided significant data insights, the LTIS model does not incorporate the capability to model pluvial and fluvial flooding at the individual property level, he explains. RMS used its U.K. Flood HD model to conduct the same analysis recently carried out by the Environment Agency, benefiting from its comprehensive set of flood events together with the vulnerability, uncertainty and loss modeling framework. This meant that RMS could model the vulnerability of each resistance/resilience package for a particular building at a much more granular level. RMS took the same vulnerability data used by the Environment Agency, which is relatively similar to the one used within the model, and ran this through the flood model, to assess the impact of each of the resistance and resilience packages against a vulnerability baseline to establish their overall effectiveness. The results revealed a significant difference between the model numbers generated by the LTIS model and those produced by the RMS Europe Inland Flood HD Models. Since hazard data used by the Environment Agency did not include pluvial flood risk, combined with general lower resolution layers than used in the RMS model, the LTIS study presented an overconcentration and hence overestimation of flood depths at the property level. As a result, the perceived benefits of the various resilience and resistance measures were underestimated — the potential benefits attributed to each package in some instances were almost double those of the original study. The findings can show how using a particular package across a subset of about 500,000 households in certain specific locations, could achieve a potential reduction in annual average losses from flood events of up to 40 percent at a country level. This could help Flood Re understand how to allocate resources to generate the greatest potential and achieve the most significant benefit. A Return on Investment? There is still much work to be done to establish an evidence base for the specific value of property-level resilience and resistance measures of sufficient granularity to better inform flood-related investment decisions. “The initial indications from the ongoing Flood Re cost-benefit analysis work are that resistance measures, because they are cheaper to implement, will prove a more cost-effective approach across a wider group of properties in flood-exposed areas,” McInally indicates. “However, in a post-repair scenario, the cost-benefit results for resilience measures are also favorable.” However, he is wary about making any definitive statements at this early stage based on the research to date. “Flood by its very nature includes significant potential ‘hit-and-miss factors’,” he points out. “You could, for example, make cities such as Hull or Carlisle highly flood resistant and resilient, and yet neither location might experience a major flood event in the next 30 years while the Lake District and West Midlands might experience multiple floods. So the actual impact on reducing the cost of flooding from any program of investment will, in practice, be very different from a simple modeled long-term average benefit. Insurance industry modeling approaches used by Flood Re, which includes the use of the RMS Europe Inland Flood HD Models, could help improve understanding of the range of investment benefit that might actually be achieved in practice.”
Are We Moving Off The Baseline?
How is climate change influencing natural perils and weather extremes, and what should reinsurance companies do to respond? Reinsurance companies may feel they are relatively insulated from the immediate effects of climate change on their business, given that most property catastrophe policies are renewed on an annual basis. However, with signs that we are already moving off the historical baseline when it comes to natural perils, there is evidence to suggest that underwriters should already be selectively factoring the influence of climate change into their day-to-day decision-making. Most climate scientists agree that some of the extreme weather anticipated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 is already here and can be linked to climate change in real time via the burgeoning field of extreme weather attribution. “It’s a new area of science that has grown up in the last 10 to 15 years,” explains Dr. Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer at RMS. “Scientists run two climate models for the whole globe, both of them starting in 1950. One keeps the atmospheric chemistry static since then, while the other reflects the actual increase in greenhouse gases. By simulating thousands of years of these alternative worlds, we can find the difference in the probability of a particular weather extreme.” “Underwriters should be factoring the influence of climate change into their day-to-day decision-making” For instance, climate scientists have run their models in an effort to determine how much the intensity of the precipitation that caused such devastating flooding during last year’s Hurricane Harvey can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Research conducted by scientists at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project has found that the record rainfall produced by Harvey was at least three times more likely to be due to the influence of global warming. This suggests, for certain perils and geographies, reinsurers need to be considering the implications of an increased potential for certain climate extremes in their underwriting. “If we can’t rely on the long-term baseline, how and where do we modify our perspective?” asks Muir-Wood. “We need to attempt to answer this question peril by peril, region by region and by return period. You cannot generalize and say that all perils are getting worse everywhere, because they’re not. In some countries and perils there is evidence that the changes are already material, and then in many other areas the jury is out and it’s not clear.” Keeping Pace With the Change While the last IPCC Assessment Report (AR5) was published in 2014 (the next is due in 2021), there is some consensus on how climate change is beginning to influence natural perils and climate extremes. Many regional climates naturally have large variations at interannual and even interdecadal timescales, which makes observation of climate change, and validation of predictions, more difficult. “There is always going to be uncertainty when it comes to climate change,” emphasizes Swenja Surminski, head of adaptation research at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). “But when you look at the scientific evidence, it’s very clear what’s happening to temperature, how the average temperature is increasing, and the impact that this can have on fundamental things, including extreme events.” According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report in 2018, “Too little has been done to mitigate climate change and … our own analysis shows that the likelihood of missing the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius or below is greater than the likelihood of achieving it.” The report cites extreme weather events and natural disasters as the top two “most likely” risks to happen in the next 10 years and the second- and third-highest risks (in the same order) to have the “biggest impact” over the next decade, after weapons of mass destruction. The failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation is also ranked in the top five for both likelihood and impact. It notes that 2017 was among the three hottest years on record and the hottest ever without an El Niño. It is clear that climate change is already exacerbating climate extremes, says Surminski, causing dry regions to become drier and hot regions to become hotter. “By now, based on our scientific understanding and also thanks to modeling, we get a much better picture of what our current exposure is and how that might be changing over the next 10, 20, even 50 to 100 years,” she says. “There is also an expectation we will have more freak events, when suddenly the weather produces really unexpected, very unusual phenomena,” she continues. “That’s not just climate change. It’s also tied into El Niño and other weather phenomena occurring, so it’s a complex mix. But right now, we’re in a much better position to understand what’s going on and to appreciate that climate change is having an impact.” Pricing for Climate Change For insurance and reinsurance underwriters, the challenge is to understand the extent to which we have already deviated from the historical record and to manage and price for that appropriately. It is not an easy task given the inherent variability in existing weather patterns, according to Andy Bord, CEO of Flood Re, the U.K.’s flood risk pool, which has a panel of international reinsurers. “The existing models are calibrated against data that already includes at least some of the impact of climate change,” he says. “Some model vendors have also recently produced models that aim to assess the impact of climate change on the future level of flood risk in the U.K. We know at least one larger reinsurer has undertaken their own climate change impact analyses. “We view improving the understanding of the potential variability of weather given today’s climate as being the immediate challenge for the insurance industry, given the relatively short-term view of markets,” he adds. The need for underwriters to appreciate the extent to which we may have already moved off the historical baseline is compounded by the conflicting evidence on how climate change is influencing different perils. And by the counterinfluence or confluence, in many cases, of naturally occurring climate patterns, such as El Niño and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). The past two decades have seen below-normal European windstorm activity, for instance, and evidence builds that the unprecedented reduction in Arctic sea ice during the autumn months is the main cause, according to Dr. Stephen Cusack, director of model development at RMS. “In turn, the sea ice declines have been driven both by the ‘polar amplification’ aspect of anthropogenic climate change and the positive phase of the AMO over the past two decades, though their relative roles are uncertain. “We view improving the understanding of the potential variability of weather given today’s climate as being the immediate challenge for the insurance industry, given the relatively short-term view of markets” Andy Bord Flood Re “The (re)insurance market right now is saying, ‘Your model has higher losses than our recent experience.’ And what we are saying is that the recent lull is not well understood, and we are unsure how long it will last. Though for pricing future risk, the question is when, and not if, the rebound in European windstorm activity happens. Regarding anthropogenic climate change, other mechanisms will strengthen and counter the currently dominant ‘polar amplification’ process. Also, the AMO goes into positive and negative phases,” he continues. “It’s been positive for the last 20 to 25 years and that’s likely to change within the next decade or so.” And while European windstorm activity has been somewhat muted by the AMO, the same cannot be said for North Atlantic hurricane activity. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria (HIM) caused an estimated US$92 billion in insured losses, making 2017 the second costliest North Atlantic hurricane season, according to Swiss Re Sigma. “The North Atlantic seems to remain in an active phase of hurricane activity, irrespective of climate change influences that may come on top of it,” the study states. While individual storms are never caused by one factor alone, stressed the Sigma study, “Some of the characteristics observed in HIM are those predicted to occur more frequently in a warmer world.” In particular, it notes the high level of rainfall over Houston and hurricane intensification. While storm surge was only a marginal contributor to the losses from Hurricane Harvey, Swiss Re anticipates the probability of extreme storm surge damage in the northeastern U.S. due to higher seas will almost double in the next 40 years. “From a hurricane perspective, we can talk about the frequency of hurricanes in a given year related to the long-term average, but what’s important from the climate change point of view is that the frequency and the intensity on both sides of the distribution are increasing,” says Dr. Pete Dailey, vice president at RMS. “This means there’s more likelihood of quiet years and more likelihood of very active years, so you’re moving away from the mean, which is another way of thinking about moving away from the baseline. “So, we need to make sure that we are modeling the tail of the distribution really well, and that we’re capturing the really wet years — the years where there’s a higher frequency of torrential rain in association with events that we model.” The Edge of Insurability Over the long term, the industry likely will be increasingly insuring the impact of anthropogenic climate change. One question is whether we will see “no-go” areas in the future, where the risk is simply too high for insurance and reinsurance companies to take on. As Robert Muir-Wood of RMS explains, there is often a tension between the need for (re)insurers to charge an accurate price for the risk and the political pressure to ensure cover remains available and affordable. He cites the community at Queen’s Cove in Grand Bahama, where homes were unable to secure insurance given the repeated storm surge flood losses they have sustained over the years from a number of hurricanes. Unable to maintain a mortgage without insurance, properties were left to fall into disrepair. “Natural selection came up with a solution,” says Muir-Wood, whereby some homeowners elevated buildings on concrete stilts thereby making them once again insurable. “In high-income, flood-prone countries, such as Holland, there has been sustained investment in excellent flood defenses,” he says. “The challenge in developing countries is there may not be the money or the political will to build adequate flood walls. In a coastal city like Jakarta, Indonesia, where the land is sinking as a result of pumping out the groundwater, it’s a huge challenge. “It’s not black and white as to when it becomes untenable to live somewhere. People will find a way of responding to increased incidence of flooding. They may simply move their life up a level, as already happens in Venice, but insurability will be a key factor and accommodating the changes in flood hazard is going to be a shared challenge in coastal areas everywhere.” Political pressure to maintain affordable catastrophe insurance was a major driver of the U.S. residual market, with state-backed Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans providing basic property insurance for homes that are highly exposed to natural catastrophes. Examples include the California Earthquake Association, Texas Windstorm Insurance Association and Florida Citizens Property Insurance Corporation (and state reinsurer, the FHCF). However, the financial woes experienced by FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), currently the principal provider of residential flood insurance in the U.S., demonstrates the difficulties such programs face in terms of being sustainable over the long term. With the U.K.’s Flood Re scheme, investment in disaster mitigation is a big part of the solution, explains CEO Andy Bord. However, even then he acknowledges that “for some homes at the very greatest risk of flooding, the necessary investment needed to reduce risks and costs would simply be uneconomic.”
The Future for Flood Protection
With innovation in the flood market increasing, EXPOSURE explores whether high-definition (HD) flood models are one of the keys to closing the protection gap In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey brought the highest level of rainfall associated with a tropical cyclone in the U.S. since records began, causing catastrophic flooding in some of the most populated areas of the Texas coast, including Houston. The percentage of losses attributed to inland flood versus wind damage was significant, altering the historical view that precipitation resulting from a tropical storm or hurricane is an attritional loss and highlighting the need for stochastic modeling. Total economic losses resulting from Harvey were around US$85 billion and insured losses were US$30 billion, revealing a significant protection gap, particularly where inland flood damage was concerned. Around 200,000 homes were inundated by the floods, and yet 80 percent of homes in the Houston area were uninsured. Hurricane Harvey Impacts – Aftermath An innovative catastrophe bond has suggested one way this protection gap could be reduced in the future, particularly as a private flood insurance market develops in the U.S. FloodSmart Re, which was announced at the end of July 2018, secured US$500 million of reinsurance protection on behalf of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Reinsurer Hannover Re was acting as the ceding reinsurer for the transaction, sitting between the NFIP and its Bermuda-based special purpose insurer. “It’s a landmark transaction — the first time in history that the U.S. federal government is sponsoring a catastrophe bond,” says John Seo, co-founder and managing principal at Fermat Capital. “It’s just tremendous and I couldn’t be more excited. Events like Harvey are going to accelerate the development of the flood market in terms of risk transfer to the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market. “You have to have more efficient risk pooling and risk sharing mechanisms,” he adds. “There’s over US$200 trillion dollars of capital in the world, so there’s obviously enough to efficiently absorb event risk. So, it’s about, how do you get it out into that larger capital base in an efficient way?” While the bond only provides cover for flooding arising from named storms, either due to storm surge or rainfall, it is a “good test case for the ILS market’s appetite for flood risks,” according to ILS blog Artemis. While “it is not a broad flood coverage, it will likely help to make it more palatable to cat bond investors given their comfort with modeling the probability of named storms, tropical storms and hurricanes.” According to Cory Anger, global head of ILS origination and structuring at GC Securities, the ILS market is certainly showing an appetite for flood risk — including inland flood risk — with several catastrophe bonds completed during 2017 for European flood risk (Generali’s Lion II), Japanese flood risk (MSI and ADI’s Akibare Series 2018-1 Notes) and U.S. flood risk. “Both public and private sector entities see value from utilizing capital markets’ capacity to manage flood risk,” she says. “We think there are other geographic regions that would be interested in ILS capacity that haven’t yet tapped the ILS markets. Given the recent success of FEMA/NFIP’s FloodSmart Re Series 2018-1 Notes, we expect FEMA/NFIP to continue to utilize ILS capacity (along with traditional reinsurance capital) to support future U.S. flood risk transfer opportunities.” The ILS sector has grown significantly over the past 15 years, with deals becoming more complex and innovative over time. Many market commentators feel the market was put to the test following the major natural catastrophe losses in 2017. Not only did bonds pay out where they were triggered, fresh capital re-entered, demonstrating investors’ confidence in the sector and its products. “I’m hearing people starting to coin the phrase that 2018 is the ‘great reload,’” says Seo. “This is something I have been saying for quite some years: That the traditional hard-soft, soft-hard market cycle is over. It’s not that you can’t have an event so large that it doesn’t impact the market, but when it comes to capital markets, high yields are actually a siren call for capital. “I don’t think anyone doubts that had 2017 occurred in the absence of the ILS market it would have been a completely different story, and we would have had a traditional hard market scenario in 2018,” he adds. FloodSmart Re has clearly demonstrated the strong investor interest in such transactions. According to Anger, GC Securities acted as the structuring agent for the transaction and was one of two book runners. More than 35 capital markets investors provided fully collateralized protection to FEMA/NFIP on the landmark catastrophe bond. “The appetite for new perils is generally strong, so there’s always strong interest when new risks are brought to market,” says Ben Brookes, managing director of capital and resilience solutions at RMS. He thinks improvements in the underlying data quality along with high-definition flood models make it more likely that inland flood could be included as a peril in future catastrophe bond issuances on behalf of private insurers, on an indemnity basis. “In the early days of the cat bond market, new perils would typically be issued with parametric triggers, because investors were skeptical that sufficient data quality was achieved or that the indemnity risks were adequately captured by cat models. But that changed as investor comfort grew, and a lot of capital entered the market and you saw all these deals becoming indemnity. Increased comfort with risk modeling was a big part of that.” The innovative Blue Wings catastrophe bond, which covered insurer Allianz for severe U.K. flood risk (and some U.S. and Canadian quake) and was completed in 2007, is a good example. The parametric bond used an index to calculate flood depths at over 50 locations across the U.K., was ahead of its time and is the only U.K. flood catastrophe bond that has come to market. According to Anger, as models have become more robust for flood risk — whether due to tropical cyclone (storm surge and excess precipitation) or inland flooding (other than from tropical cyclone) — the investor base has been open to trigger selection (e.g., indemnity or parametric). “In general, insurers are preferring indemnity-triggered solutions,” she adds, “which the ILS market has concurrently been open to. Additionally, for this peril, the ILS community has been open to per occurrence and annual aggregate structures, which gives flexibility to sponsors to incorporate ILS capital in their risk transfer programs.” As the private market develops, cat bond sponsors from the insurance market would be more likely to bundle inland flood risk in with other perils, thinks Charlotte Acton, director of capital and resilience solutions at RMS. “A degree of hurricane-induced inland flood risk is already present on a non-modeled basis within some transactions in the market,” she says. “And Harvey illustrates the value in comprehensive modeling of flooding associated with named storms. “So, for a broader portfolio, in most cases, inland flood would be one piece of the picture as it will be exposed to multiple perils. However, a stand-alone inland flood bond is possible for a public sector or corporate sponsor that has specific exposure to flood risk.” With inland flood, as with all other perils, sophisticated models help to make markets. “A fund would look at the risk in and of itself in the deal, but of course they’d also want to understand the price and returns perspective as well,” says Brookes. “Models play into that quite heavily. You can’t price a bond well, and understand the returns of a bond, unless you understand the risk of it.” As the ILS market makes increasing use of indemnity protection through ultimate net loss (UNL) triggers, sophisticated HD flood modeling will be essential in order to transfer the peril to the capital markets. This allows clear parameters to be set around different hours clauses and deductible structures, for instance, in addition to modeling all causes of flood and the influence of local defenses. “It’s a landmark transaction — the first time in history that the U.S. Federal Government is sponsoring a catastrophe bond” John SEO Fermat capital Jillian Williams, chief underwriting officer at Leadenhall Capital Partners, notes that ILS is increasingly bundling together multiple perils in an effort to gain diversification. “Diversification is important for any investment strategy, as you are always trying to minimize the risk of losing large amounts in one go,” she says. “Cat bonds (144A’s) currently have defined perils, but collateralized reinsurance and private cat bonds can cover all perils. Complexities and flow of information to all parties will be a challenge for cat bonds to move from defined perils to UNL all perils. “Any new peril or structure in a cat bond will generate many questions, even if they don’t have a major impact on the potential losses,” she continues. “Investors will want to know why the issuers want to include these new perils and structures and how the associated risk is calculated. For UNL, all flood (not just sea surge) would be included in the cat bond, so the definition of the peril, its complexities, variables and its correlation to other perils will need to be evaluated and represented in the flood models used.” She thinks the potential to transfer more flood to the capital markets is there, but that the complexity of the peril are challenges that need to be overcome, particularly in the U.S. “Flood coverage is already starting to move into the capital markets, but there are many issues that need to be worked through before it can be moved to a 144A transaction in a UNL format for many territories,” says Williams. “Just one of the complexities is that flood risk may be covered by government pools. “To move flood perils from government pools to private insurers is like any evolution, it can take time, particularly if existing coverage is subsidized,” she adds. “For private insurers, the complexity is not just about flood modeling but also about ensuring risk-adequate pricing and navigating through government legislation.”
