2015

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 cycloneswere 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.

On June 27, 2015, a severe thunderstorm struck the small town of Roseisle, Manitoba, just over an hour’s drive southwest of Winnipeg. Hail was reported to be tennis ball–sized and accompanied by winds of 100 km/h (62 mph).

As information about cyber breach hazard is disseminated—often as a reaction to hacks such as the Target attack of 2013 or the Sony breach of 2014—interest in cyber insurance increases. Standards for cyber insurance are in the evolutionary stages, and take-up rates are still low.

Since 2012, 1,321 cases and 466 deaths associated with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) have been reported, mainly in Saudi Arabia. But little attention was paid due to the disease's low transmission between humans and relatively low case counts.

In 2011, a record was set for insured losses from severe thunderstorms. In all, more than USD 26 billion of losses left insurance companies wondering if they had underestimated nature's potential or—more importantly—if we were in the midst of a fundamental shift in the distribution of severe thunderstorm risk.

Fracking and the injection of waste water from oil extraction into disposal wells are hot topics at the moment. The principal concerns are their possible human health and environmental impacts, particularly "man-made earthquakes."

Imagine you insure a set of locations spread out over an area. If you take a circle (radius of your choosing) and float it over a map of the region, at which point does it encompass the highest total accumulated exposure value?