Insuring Future Climate Change

We will prioritize non-life insurance and, in particular, damages to private and public property, buildings, installations and infrastructure, focusing on Norway. Research will be from an applied point of view, reflecting problems and challenges posed by the insurance business itself. The applicants form a cross-disciplinary and cross-national collaboration of statisticians, actuaries, economists, geographers, meteorologists and climate researchers from Norway, the UK and the USA. The research activiti es will be organised into six work packages, each involving one or several partners. The first work package focuses on short term predictions of weather related losses. The aim is to develop models for the relationship between the weather and insurance lo sses. These models are the basis for doing long term prediction of weather related losses, involving climate scenarios. Our second and third work package focus on improving the downscaling and tail-behaviour of the climate models for Norway and combining these with the loss models from the first work package. The fourth work package is more qualitative and will study the causes of increased weather related insurance losses from a geographical point of view. The overall aim is to disentangle the contributi ons due to changes in the climate from other factors such as intensification and concentration of building masses. Insight obtained in this work package can be used to improve the loss models and long term predictions in terms of adding new explanatory va riables. The fifth package focuses on extreme weather events and natural perils, which today are covered by the Norwegian Natural Perils pool, and are likely to become more frequent as the climate changes. Finally, the sixth work package is dedicated to d issemination; to distribute widely and efficiently the results of the project, build networks, contribute to training of students and recruit future researchers and research leaders in the field.