Tag Archives: flood

Talk on climate models and insurance

Tomorrow morning, at 7 am, I will give a talk at the Actuarial Conference # 62 on climate models and insurance, getting back on two recent paper.

  • Flood, French’s Nat Cat System and Fairness

The first paper is Insurance against NaturalCatastrophes: Balancing Actuarial Fairness and Social Solidarity with Laurence Barry (PARI) and Molly James (EURIA)

Based on official risk areas (PPRL and PPRI)

we will investigate the prices of houses and apartments

and discuss connections between risk and wealth.

  • Subsidence and predictions

The second paper is Predicting Drought and SubsidenceRisks in France with Hani Ali (Willis Re) and Molly James (EURIA)

We did try several models to predict subsidence frequency

GLMs and also random forests

Then we got predictions for frequency, in 2017

and 2018

Then, we’ve been able to derive some risk maps

Here are predictions for costs for 2017

for 2019

and for 2020

I still wonder how to take into account climate change in this approach (except that we are more and more likely to be in the upper left corner – hot and dry)

  • Extensions (wildfires in Québec and RL)

Finally, I will (very briefly) discuss two recent works, the first one with Amirouche Benchallal (UQAM) and Yacine Bouroubi (Sherbrooke) on wildfire in Québec

and the second one, with Nouri Sakr (Columbia) and Mennatalla Mohamed Hassan (AmericanUniversity in Cairo) on government intervention in the context of natural catastrophes.

Insurance against Natural Catastrophes: Balancing Actuarial Fairness and Social Solidarity

Our research paper, Insurance against Natural Catastrophes: Balancing Actuarial Fairness and Social Solidarity, with Molly James and Laurence Barry, is now published in the Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance.

Natural disasters offer a special case for the study of private and public insurance mix. Indeed, the experience accumulated over the past decades has made it possible to transform poorly known hazards, long considered uninsurable, into risks that can be assessed with some precision. They exemplify however the limits of the risk-based premiums method, as it might imply unaffordability for some. The French scheme reflects such ideas and offers a wide coverage for moderate premiums to all, but is shaken by climate change: we show that some wealthier areas, that were not perceived as “at risk” in the past, have become exposed to submersion risk in the future. This singularly makes some well-off properties the potential main beneficiaries of a scheme that was historically thought to protect the worst-off. Acknowledging that some segmentation might become desirable, we examine several models for flood risk and the disparity in premiums they entail.

Insurance against Natural Catastrophes: Balancing Actuarial Fairness and Social Solidarity

Our research paper, Insurance against Natural Catastrophes: Balancing Actuarial Fairness and Social Solidarity, with Molly James and Laurence Barry, is now available.

Natural disasters offer a special case for the study of private and public insurance mix. Indeed, the experience accumulated over the past decades has made it possible to transform poorly known hazards, long considered uninsurable, into risks that can be assessed with some precision. They exemplify however the limits of the risk-based premiums method, as it might imply unaffordability for some. The French scheme reflects such ideas and offers a wide coverage for moderate premiums to all, but is shaken by climate change: we show that some wealthier areas, that were not perceived as “at risk” in the past, have become exposed to submersion risk in the future. This singularly makes some well-off properties the potential main beneficiaries of a scheme that was historically thought to protect the worst-off. Acknowledging that some segmentation might become desirable, we examine several models for flood risk and the disparity in premiums they entail.

Increasing number of catastrophes and human factor

Peter asked me (here) to discuss the occurrence of natural catastrophes. I have looked at the EM-DAT dataset (here), and more specifically three kinds of risks: earthquakes, floods and storms (in any country over the past century). For earthquakes, we have the following figures,

the blue points are raw data (I mean, public ones, those that can be downloaded on the website), and I added two smoothed patterns, in red (based on splines regressions). This is no reason to assume that there could be an increase of the number of earthquakes. The trend is due to the fact that we look at earthquakes considered as catastrophic, i.e. that caused deaths and severe damages. And as pointed out in Peter’s comment, it means that “the increase in ‘disasters’ might have a lot to do with the development of the population”.
If we look now at storms, we have

i.e. also an increasing trend. But here, we can consider that the trend can be explained by two factors: an inflation due to the value at risk (e.g. increase of concentration of population in some areas as for earthquakes) but maybe also a change that can be related to climate change.  If we remove the pattern du to the increase of value at risk on the raw data (i.e. we divide raw data by the trend observed on earthquakes, the red line), we have

Here it looks like the number of catastrophic storms is increasing (removing the human factor). And it might be possible to relate that trend to climate change. If we look finally at major flood events, we also observe an increase of the pattern,

and we can divide by the trend observed on earthquakes, to obtain

Looking at that graph, it is possible to propose another interpretation about the increase: people might have a shorter memory about rivers than the one they have on earthquakes; and that they think they might influence climate risk, and flood risk, (but not physical ones). I mean that people know where earthquake risk is, and did not really concentrate in those areas during the past century. On the other hand, it is possible to assume that people imagine they can change river design, e.g. building dykes, and though they can control the risk. But obviously they couldn’t.