Swenja Surminski on insurance and resilience partnerships

Dr Swenja Surminski, Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) and lead of the ENHANCE case study on London flood risk, attended the 6th Extreme Events and Climate Risks seminar on 23 and 24 October 2014. The Geneva Association, an insurance-industry think tank, organised the seminar in New York.

She had been invited to speak on developments in flood insurance in Europe. During the seminar she gave a short video interview on insurance, disaster resilience and partnerships.

Her view on partnerships was simple. Before a partnership can succeed, the stakeholders need clarity on their roles and responsibilities: who pays, who acts, who carries the risk if things go wrong. Without that, cooperation stays vague.

On insurance she issued a warning. Schemes that do not factor in climate change will not be fit for the future. The point applies to any arrangement priced on past losses, because a scheme built on the floods of the last thirty years can be overtaken by those of the next thirty.

She developed the same themes in her earlier ENHANCE interview on the London case study (Surminski on London flood risk) and in her letters from the Sendai conference in March 2015, especially the seventh, on whether insurance can create incentives to reduce risk. The scheme design debate in the UK at the time is described on the Flood Re page.