July 2015

While the name may conjure up images of moats and drawbridges, a FORTIFIED Home™ is actually a new or existing house strengthened against specific natural hazards. FORTIFIED Home is a national program designed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) to improve the resilience of buildings and reduce insurance losses.

The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has undergone many changes and improvements in recent years, starting with the Biggert-Waters Reform Act of 2012. Some of the most notable changes include revising existing rates and updating mapping information, which changed flood classifications for some policyholders.

Previously, comparing one set of loss results to another involved a cumbersome, manual process performed outside of the software. Now, Touchstone 3.0 includes an exciting new feature—Comparative Analytics—that, when used in conjunction with detailed loss analysis, lets Touchstone do the work for you, quickly and efficiently.

For centuries we have fought flooding with defenses and suffered the consequences when they fail. But increasingly engineers and designers are looking into sustainable ways to cope with floodwater—to roll with it rather than trying to fight a losing battle against it.

My London colleague Tristan Lloyd blogged recently about the UK-based Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT), which was then busy initiating its response to the April 25 earthquake near Gorkha in Nepal. EEFIT sent observers to the region to observe earthquake damage and collect data so they could report findings to the wider engineering community.

In what an Al Jazeera reporter has called "likely..the largest theft of U.S. government data in the history of the United States," millions of government employee records held by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been breached.

My colleague Tim Doggett and I recently traveled to London to participate in a Risk Prediction Initiative 2.0 workshop on Atlantic Hurricane Volatility. Several of the leading academic scientists who study tropical cyclones were there, as well as scientists from other catastrophe risk modeling companies and reinsurers.

During the third week of June this year, AIR's London Insurance-Linked Securities (ILS) Team attended the annual Convergence London seminar and Trading Risk Awards Dinner, which reviews and celebrates the past year's activity in the reinsurance and convergence markets.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and floods are shocks to cities, but communities also experience stresses from high unemployment, overtaxed or inefficient public transportation systems, endemic violence, or chronic food and water shortages. A city that has fully assessed its risk and developed a strategy to mitigate it is better able to respond to adverse events and to deliver basic functions in both good times and bad.