Steve Jewson on risk data access and climate resilience
Steve Jewson, Vice President for model development at Risk Management Solutions, told ENHANCE that better public access to weather, river and flood-defence data mattered more than anything else for risk modelling.
Steve Jewson was Vice President, Model Development at Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a catastrophe-modelling firm that served more than 400 insurers and other entities and had been involved with ClimateWise since 2007. His interview with ENHANCE dealt with identifying risk and building climate resilience.
His main point was about data. The models insurers use are only as good as the information behind them, and he named the types that matter most:
- weather records;
- the location and standard of flood defences;
- river flow;
- bathymetry, the depth and shape of river and sea beds.
He contrasted two approaches. In the United States much of this data is open, while in the UK and France access is often fee-based. As a positive example he cited the ECMWF Reanalysis, which had been made freely available and showed how public research can benefit industry.
A second gap concerned models. Europe had no community atmospheric model of its own, so insurers relied on models developed in the United States. Jewson called for more dialogue between governments and industry on sharing data.
The argument echoed a point from the second Letter from Sendai, which named access to data and models as a lasting obstacle to risk assessment in many places. How the information gap feeds the insurance gap is discussed on the protection gap page.