Hydroclimatic extremes have severe consequences in all aspects of human life causing humanitarian, environmental, and financial disasters. Modern societies and individuals endeavour to defend against these hazards by infrastructure protection plans, efficient resource management and insurance plans. Such protection “mechanisms” can be effective only if they are designed based on scientific methods that acknowledge, assess and quantify the likelihood, extent and uncertainty in estimating and predicting these geophysical phenomena and their impacts. Additionally, further uncertainty is introduced by climate change that alters the behaviour of hydroclimatic variables affecting both the magnitude and the frequency of extreme events.
This session aims to bring together geoscientists, risk management experts, and scientists working in the insurance industry in order to present the latest developments on:
• Predictive methods used in these fields to model hydroclimatic extremes, e.g., extreme value theory, stochastic and probabilistic modelling, uncertainty modelling and risk aggregation, Bayesian approaches and copulas, parameter estimation, risk management and ruin theory, decision processes, return predictability, heavy tail distributions and their implication, etc.
• Changes and trends in hydroclimatic variables e.g., storms, cyclones and tornadoes, river floods, flash floods, extreme temperatures, heat and cold waves, droughts, etc.
• How these challenges are adopted by industry (e.g., insurance and reinsurance) and how the premium is affected.
• The role of insurance in managing extreme events and the challenges arising from climate change as a strategic topic.