The number of flood events and other secondary perils that have recently impacted Europe is cause for alarm, Jens Mehlhorn, Swiss Re’s head of property treaty for EMEA, said in a video interview with this publication.
The underwriting executive said that, with $60bn of nat cat losses recorded in H1 2024, high-loss activity and $100bn loss years have become the new normal.
Storm Boris, which caused extensive flooding in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) earlier this autumn, was a severe loss event, although the full extent of losses is not yet clear, Mehlhorn said.
The storm was the result of a weather system bringing in warm air from the south, fueled by record Mediterranean sea-surface temperatures, which clashed with cold air from a low-pressure system.
Previously, this particular weather phenomenon has typically occurred only once a decade, he said.
“This year, we have seen it twice.”
On top of the CEE flooding in September, the same weather pattern caused flooding in Germany in June.
“This is in line with what we see over the last several years, that secondary perils are on a steep rise,” Mehlhorn said.
Private-public partnerships could be one solution in trying to ensure that catastrophe risk remains insurable, he suggested.
This would involve a number of parties, from policymakers trying to meet carbon reduction goals, to communities investing more in protection measures, with building codes and land-use rules revised to be more climate-resilient, and with the insurance industry reformulating the level of risk it could accept and reformulating rates to be commensurate with that risk.
“We all have an interest that natural catastrophe risks will be insurable in the future; we have the tools to make that happen,” Mehlhorn said.
“We just need to act now.”