Estimates of future flood risk in Western Europe and its potential impact on insured losses.

The large-scale and complex nature of climate change makes it difficult to assess and quantify the impact on insurance activities. Climate change is likely affecting the probability of natural hazard occurrence in terms of severity and/or frequency.

Natural catastrophe risk is a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. As a (re)-insurer it is seen that changes in year-on-year losses are a function of all these components and not just the hazard.

The present study focuses, in a first step, on assessing impacts of climate change on fluvial flood risks in Europe solely due to changes in hazard itself. A stochastic catalogue of future flood risk events is derived from Pan-European data sets of river flood probability of occurrence produced within EU FP7 RAIN project. The loss modelling framework internally developed at AXA is then used to provide a geographical view of changes in future flood risks.