2017 has been the costliest hurricane season on record as well as the busiest since 2005 with overall losses estimated at $215 billion.
According to Munich Re, this could be a foretaste of the increased intensity of natural catastrophes that reinsurers face in the future.
Within a span of just four weeks, Harvey, Irma and Maria made the 2017 hurricane season the costliest ever; insured losses are expected at around US$100 billion.
2017 was also the first time three Category 4 hurricanes—Harvey, Irma and Maria—made landfall in the United States and its territories in one year, according to the Insurance Information Institute, (I.I.I.).
Chief Executive Officer, I.I.I., Sean Kevelighan, said in a statement; “these hurricanes caused an extensive loss of life and property damage in some of our nation’s most densely populated regions, and U.S. auto, home and business insurers are playing a key role as economic first responders. This is precisely what insurance is meant to do—recover and rebuild people’s lives and the economy.”
A Munich Re report said weather preconditions for above-normal activity kick-started the intense hurricane season; “climate conditions definitely had an influence on this season’s activity.
“Although the northern North Atlantic saw a period of remarkable surface cooling between 2014–2016, this cooling signal never reached the tropical North Atlantic.”
This led to sea temperatures, which have risen since the mid-1990s, continuing to rise; the August – October 2017 sea surface anomaly was at its third highest level since 1995.
Munich Re said one of the most important outcomes of the 2017 season “should be to make sure that the risk models employed by the industry improve their capability to simulate seasonal clusters of strong storms.”
The German reinsurance giant warned that climate change, which is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme storms in most areas and increase rainfall rates within 100km of the storm’s centre, may have already played a role in the 2017 hurricane season, however, it’s still too early to make any kind of statistically based attributions.
Against the background of these projections, Munich Re warned “the 2017 season looks like a foretaste of the future. Indeed, we suspect that the future projections of increased numbers of extreme storms may materialise in terms of a higher frequency of exceptional seasons such as 2004, 2005 and 2017.”
