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Volume 8, Issue 9 (Suppl) J Earth Sci Clim Change
ISSN: 2157-7617 JESCC, an open access journal Climate Congress 2017
October 16-17, 2017
Page 12
Notes:
conferenceseries.com
October 16-17, 2017 Dubai, UAE
3rd World Congress on
Climate Change and Global Warming
Increasing losses caused by extreme weather events: What are the drivers and what is the role of
climate change?
Losses caused by natural disasters are a major factor influencing the balance sheet of insurers, especially reinsurers. Such
events have a high potential of creating extreme accumulation losses. This is why the insurance industry has built up a lot
of expertise in analyses and assess-ment of trends of losses caused by natural perils. Such losses have increased tremendously
worldwide in the last decades. In order to detect the drivers of this trend the losses have to be adjusted for changes in exposed
values. Munich Re just recently has developed a very sophisticated method for such a normalization of losses. After this
normalization a still residual loss trend can be either driven by changes in the vulnerability of assets or on the hazard side. The
results of such analyses with data of the Munich Re Nat Cat SERVICE database clearly show that in the last decades the main
drivers of the loss trend have been changes in the exposure of values, i.e., growth of population and wealth in affected regions.
Also a shift of population into more hazardous regions, especially to the coasts is increasing the losses. On the other side a
clear signal of prevention measures, e.g., investment into flood protection, already can be detected in decreasing normalized
losses caused by river floods, even though the number of intense precipitation events has increased. For thunderstorm related
loss events the number of events as well as the normalized losses has increased significantly in North America and Europe.
There is a suggestion that these increases are driven by an increase in the humidity of the lower atmosphere and thus, that
this is a secondary effect of climate change. As global warming will continue in the coming decades, its contribution to
increasing natural catastrophe losses will become more prominent, a projection also given by the 5th assessment report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Biography
Peter Hoeppe is the Chairman of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, which he founded in 2005 and had been appointed as Climate Change Advisor of the
Bavarian State Government. He has completed his Masters and PhD in Meteorology and Human Biology.
Peter Hoeppe
Munich Re, Germany
Peter Hoeppe, J Earth Sci Clim Change 2017, 8:9 (Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2157-7617-C1-032