natural disasters, insurance |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
When it comes to natural disasters, 1998 broke the insurance company bank. The global costs related to storms, floods, droughts, and fires ended up close to 90 billion dollars. That's more than the cost of all the weather-related disasters of the 1980s. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.
These scary numbers are provided courtesy of the Worldwatch Institute, and Munich Re. The "Re" in Munich Re stands for reinsurance, which is a growing industry in these uncertain climatic times. Basically, a reinsurer helps to protect an insurance company from catastrophic losses, like the damage from Hurricane Andrew back in 1992. If you live on the coast and you have hurricane coverage, then your insurance company probably has its own safety net. But the deductible built into their policy could be in the millions of dollars, since their reinsurance only takes over for a really big storm.
Munich Re and other reinsurance companies spend a lot of time and money analyzing weather patterns and the risk of climate change. After all, they stand to lose as much as anyone if the changes turn nasty. According to their report, flooding in China last year cost 30 billion dollars and uprooted about 230 million people, which is almost equal to the entire U.S. population. But weather isn't the only factor to blame. Deforestation and other changes in land use, helped to make the flooding even worse in China, as well as in Central America, where Hurricane Mitch and its heavy rainfall killed thousands of people. Let's hope that 1999 is kinder to the reinsurance folks and to the rest of us as well.
Today's contributing writer is Bob Henson. Our show is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.