۱- Introduction

۲- Weather perils in Europe

۳- Disaster statistics for Europe

۴- Risk assessment and reduction

۵- Concluding remarks

References

Abstract

Over the last decades, the damage caused by weather events has increased dramatically and ubiquitously. In Europe, weather catastrophes constitute a growing burden on national economies and insurance companies, not least because of the costs of precautionary measures. For a long time, the insurance sector has flagged that weather disasters are on the rise, both in terms of the number of occurrences and material damage caused. The main reasons for this are: increase in the number and area of settlements in exposed areas, the accumulation of ever more valuable and vulnerable assets in these areas, as well as the climate and environmental changes that have already taken place. This paper examines observed changes in risk of various categories of weather disasters in Europe, backed by statistical analyses of relevant, updated information originating from a valuable and quite unique source, Munich Re’s NatCatSERVICE database, that is of considerable interest and value to the scientific community and beyond (e.g. in the reinsurance and insurance industries). The paper also calls for partnership in the reduction of risk of weather extremes and discusses the role of the insurance industry

Introduction

There have been many weather disasters in Europe in the last two decades. They include numerous floods, such as those in northern Italy, France and Switzerland in 2000, in the upper Elbe and Danube catchments in 2002 and 2013, along the lower Danube in 2006, in the United Kingdom in 2007, in the Adriatic region in 2014, and in Germany and France in 2016. There have also been severe heat waves and droughts in the summers of 2003, 2010 and 2018; wildfires in southern and eastern Europe in 2007, 2010 and 2017; hailstorms in Germany (1984 and 2013); winter storms Kyrill (2007) and Xynthia (2010); as well as the extreme snowpack in the northern Alps in 2006 and at the beginning of 2019, just to mention a few examples. Munich Re has been systematically collecting information on natural disasters since 1974. The NatCatSERVICE (NCS) database run by the company, covering losses caused by natural extreme events, is among the world’s largest and contains more than 40,000 entries. The number of disastrous weather events included in the database is growing much faster than the number of geophysical events (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) (Kundzewicz et al., 2014). This finding holds for several periods of analysis. This could have something to do with climate change, but also with non-climatic factors, such as landuse and land-cover change. Exposure has been growing with the intensification of human settlement of unsafe areas, such as flood plains. Impacts from severe weather are not as devastating to European societies (in particular to the population of industrialised countries of the European Union and OECD) as to those in some other parts of the world, where whole countries are sometimes thrown back years in their development by the occurrence of disastrous weather extremes. On the whole, wealthy European Union countries make efforts to manage (and reduce) risk of weather extremes and to improve societal resilience (Hegger et al., 2016; Priest et al., 2016). But European states do have a significant burden not only from natural disasters themselves, but also from the costly measures that citizens demand from their governments to protect themselves and their properties, especially against the flood hazard. De Bruijn et al. (2017) examined resilience in practice, reviewing principles to enable societies to cope with extreme weather events.