Swiss Re: 2023 breaks catastrophe loss records
For the first time, severe thunderstorms are a major contributor to the year’s historic natural catastrophe losses.
Natural catastrophes are on track to break loss records in 2023, Swiss Re reported this week.
“The cumulative effect of frequent, low-loss events, along with increasing property values and repair costs, has a big impact on an insurer’s profitability over a longer period,” Jérôme Jean Haegeli, Swiss Re’s group chief economist, said in a press release about the carrier’s new report. “The high frequency of severe thunderstorms in 2023 has been an earnings’ test for the primary insurance industry.”
One new development: Severe thunderstorms are a major contributor to the year’s historic natural catastrophe losses, Swiss Re said, adding that this is the first time that severe thunderstorms spurred such historic losses.
Here are some additional takeaways from Swiss Re’s latest catastrophe calculations:
- The high frequency of low single-digit billion-dollar events add up to large insured losses that will exceed the $100 billion threshold for the fourth consecutive year.
- Losses from severe thunderstorms have steadily increased by 7% annually in the last 30 years. 2023 marks an increase of almost 90% compared to the previous 5-year average ($32 billion), and more than doubles the previous 10-year average ($27 billion).
- The U.S. is particularly prone to severe consecutive storms due to its geographical location. In 2023, the amount of $50 billion insured losses for storm activity was exceeded for the first time — and it is set to keep rising.
- The U.S. has experienced 18 events year to date, which each caused insured losses of $1 billion and above.
- The February 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria was the costliest natural catastrophe of the year to date, accounting for roughly $6 billion in insured losses.
- The re/insurance industry covered roughly 40% of the economic losses this year, or $269 billion, which signals a large global protection gap.
“For the insurance industry, recent events provide robust benchmarks for estimating the increasing loss trends,” Swiss Re’s Head of Catastrophe Perils Balz Grollimund said in a prepared statement. “Nevertheless, to further progress the deeper understanding of this peril, it is important to get better insights from primary insurers on distributions of insured exposure and detailed claims data. It is equally important that insurance premiums adequately reflect the risk for the coverage provided especially also in light of increasing loss trends.”
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