Swenja Surminski on flood risk, insurance and partnerships in London
In 2014 Swenja Surminski of the London School of Economics explained how the ENHANCE London case study tested whether flood insurance and city partnerships actually lead to physical risk reduction.
Swenja Surminski, Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and a member of CCCEP, led the ENHANCE case study on London, “Flood risk and climate change implications for MSPs”. The interview dates from 2014, when Flood Re was still a proposal.
The case study had two partnerships in view. The first was the public-private arrangement between the UK government and insurers on flood cover, together with the proposed Flood Re scheme, and how both affect flood resilience in London and the incentives to reduce risk. The second was the London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP), established in 2002. A specific focus was Drain London, the programme on surface-water flooding led by the Greater London Authority.
The work was done jointly with Prof Jim Hall at the University of Oxford. Together the teams built an agent-based model of insurance-related instruments and the behaviour of stakeholders.
Her main view was direct. In practice the link between risk transfer and physical risk reduction is weak: insurance moves the cost of a flood around without necessarily making the next one smaller. Beyond insurers, she named property developers as a key group, since they decide where and how new homes are built.
She referred to Surminski and Eldridge (2014) on flood insurance in England and to two LSE blog posts from 2013 and 2014. The scheme that came out of those debates is described on the Flood Re page, and the case study itself in the London flood case record.