Hail is a major driver of insured property damage in Canada, but testing resilience of roofing material by dropping steel balls on it has limited value, a CatIQ Connect speaker suggested Wednesday. Roy Wright, president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, described how the industry tends to test roofing materials.
When the ground shakes in Puerto Rico and it is time to head for higher ground, the people in the northwestern coastal city of Aguadilla find out the old way: the shrill of whistles. Aguadilla is one of two dozen cities on the island that do not have emergency alert sirens, even as hundreds of earthquakes have rattled Puerto Rico for weeks.
As the effects of climate change increase in severity, world financial leaders debate over just how much the crisis is affecting the global economy. Back in February 2019, Morgan Stanley released a report outlining the costs of climate disasters in the last three years. Of the $650 billion in economic losses, $415 billion of that came from North America.
The ongoing outbreak of bushfires in Australia are now said to be the costliest example from an insurance and reinsurance market loss perspective, as the latest data shows losses reached A$1.65 billion (US $1.13bn).
Firefighters in the western United States face a shared struggle with others around the world who battle wildfires as the “seasons” for these events seem to grow longer and more destructive every year. Climate change and human encroachment on wildlands—driven by property development and agriculture—have fostered conditions that increase fire risk in disparate regions, from California, to Australia, to the Amazon rainforest, to Siberia.
Aon has published its latest catastrophe report, which points to a gaping insurance hole for 2019. According to the broking giant’s Weather, Climate & Catastrophe Insight: 2019 Annual Report released today, last year’s 409 natural catastrophe events equated to $232 billion in economic losses.
California enjoyed a comparatively mild wildfire season in 2019, but it wasn’t enough to save Bobbi Pimentel’s homeowners’ insurance policy. Pimentel and her husband, who live in a rural area 30 miles east of Redding, got the dreaded notice in late November: Horace Mann Educators Corp., which has insured their property for 13 years, wouldn’t renew their policy.
A climate research organization will offer access to a risk model that predicts the probability of flooding for homes across the United States, giving the public a look at the data institutional investors use to gauge risk.
The six-month 2019 North American hurricane season is officially in the books, and it was an active one in terms of named storm counts, with the majority of activity coming in the typical mid-August and mid-October periods.
From Jan. 1 to Oct. 4, 2019, there were 41,074 California wildfires, with 4.4 million acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. California also sustained its largest fire in state history last year—the Mendocino Complex Fire, which burned 459,123 acres.
Hurricanes remain the most expensive natural disaster — even when compared to the massive floods, powerful tornadoes, drought, wildfires and other catastrophes plaguing the Untied States.
In 2018, extreme weather had a devastating impact on certain states — primarily driven by increasing severity, rather than frequency, of catastrophic events.
Thousands of tourists and residents evacuated parts of Australia on Friday as hot temperatures and strong winds were expected to worsen wildfire conditions over the weekend.
Thanks to climate change, so-called “secondary perils” are a least as threatening to global property and casualty insurers as primary perils such as earthquakes or hurricanes, according to the latest sigma study published by Swiss Re.
Hundreds of Houston homeowners near U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-managed reservoirs may receive compensation for flooding of their properties during 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
