Catastrophe loss aggregator PERILS has estimated that the series of windstorms that impacted the British Isles and continental Europe through February this year will drive insured property market losses of €3,289 million.
The series consisted of three storms named Ylenia, Zeynep and Antonia in Europe and Dudley, Eunice and Franklin in the UK, which battered areas in rapid succession from 16th to 21st February 2022.
PERILS’s loss estimate, which is based on claims data collected from insurers, suggests that the majority of costs were incurred in Germany, followed by the Benelux states, the UK and France.
The risk modeller also recorded modest losses in Austria, Denmark and Switzerland, as well as Poland and the Czech Republic, although it does not cover these territories.
Notably, PERILS’s industry loss figure is significantly lower than the initial estimate of €5 billion put forward by Fitch Ratings days after the final storm, and is on the lower end of the €3 billion to €4.5 billion range fielded by RMS.
In line with the PERILS reporting schedule, an updated estimate of the market loss from the storm series will be made available on 20 May 2022, three months after the event end date.
The cluster of windstorms was driven by a strong jet stream which acted as a conveyor belt for low-pressure systems from the North Atlantic across the British Isles and on into Europe.
PERILS explained that this clustering phenomena is not uncommon for European extratropical cyclones but poses a challenge for the insurance sector as it makes it difficult to precisely allocate insurance claims to a specific storm.
Moreover, event definition clauses for reinsurance purposes are not homogenous in Europe and can include meteorological conditions plus loss aggregation periods ranging from 72 hours up to 168 hours.
Given these factors, PERILS has reported the losses from the European windstorm series as a single insurance event.
The storm series generated strong winds across the British Isles and Western Europe causing major disruption and extensive damage to insured properties with the strongest impact from Zeynep (Eunice) and the weakest from Antonia (Franklin).
In total, approximately 1.8 million individual insurance claims were filed. While the vast majority were for non-structural damage with moderate average claim sizes, the huge number of claims could result in the largest European windstorm loss since Kyrill in January 2007, PERILS says.
Based on an actuarial analysis of European windstorm activity over the last 43 years, a loss of this size might be reached or exceeded approximately once every nine years on average.
