CRESTA’s latest quarterly update on its CLIX industry loss list shows that event losses of $1bn are happening over 4.5 times per year on average.
In the latest update, a total of 22 Cat events which occurred in the past three years were reviewed and updated where new information became available. CLIX, the CRESTA Industry Loss Index, provides industry loss data on international Cat events (excluding US) which have generated industry losses in excess of $1bn.
Matthias Saenger, product manager of CRESTA, commented: “An analysis of the CLIX industry loss database shows that an event loss of $1bn is reached or exceeded on average 4.5 times per year. With three events already confirmed to have exceeded this loss level in Q1 and three more events in Q2 under investigation, it looks entirely possible that 2022 will become an above-average year for international Cat loss activity.”
He continued: “CRESTA CLIX provides a consistent and systematic event loss history which can be used for a range of actuarial analysis. We are delighted to see that the adoption of CLIX by the insurance and reinsurance market continues to increase, and we thank all our subscribers for their support.”
For 2022 to date, the European windstorm series of mid-February tops the list of international catastrophe insurance losses with an industry loss of $4.1bn. It is closely followed by the flood event in Eastern Australia during February-March 2022 which generated an industry loss currently estimated at $3.7bn, and the Mw7.3 earthquake which struck the area of Fukushima in Japan on 16 March 2022 with an estimated industry loss of $2.3bn.
Three new events in the second quarter of 2022 which have the potential to generate an industry loss in excess of$1bn are currently under investigation. These include the KwaZulu-Natal floods in South Africa in April, the Ontario/Quebec derecho storm in Canada in May, and the severe convective storms in France in June.
The Mw7.3 Fukushima earthquake of 2022 had a striking resemblance to the Mw7.0 Fukushima earthquake of 13 February 2021. In a seismological context, both events can be considered long-term aftershocks of the catastrophic Mw9.1 Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011. But unlike the Tohoku earthquake, the more recent events did not generate significant tsunami waves and insurance damage was largely the result of ground shaking, which affected a similar area across the prefectures of Fukushima, Myagi and Iwate. In its latest CLIX update, CRESTA estimates the industry loss of the 2021 Fukushima event at $2.5bn, while the 2022 Fukushima event is estimated at $2.3bn.
