Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility delays excess rainfall insurance product

The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), a non-profit multi-country risk pooling facility who provide parametric hurricane and earthquake cover to Caribbean countries, has had to delay the launch of its long awaited excess rainfall insurance product.

We first announced that the CCRIF were working with the  Caribbean Institute for Meterology and Hydrology (CIMH) and Kinetic Analysis Corporation (Kinanco) to develop and test a parametric excess rainfall insurance product for catastrophic flood coverage in the region in October 2009.

The rainfall product has been much-needed to enable the CCRIF to provide a more complete range of cover to the Caribbean Island nations, especially for cases when a tropical storm doesn’t achieve a high enough wind speed to trigger their main facility but still devastates an island through rainfall and flooding.

Following a comprehensive review of outputs from the Regional Rainfall Model which was developed for CCRIF by Kinanco and the CIMH, the CCRIF has concluded that the model is not yet ready for use. They say that the historical rainfall record produced by the model using NOAA data is not yet robust enough to underpin a parametric rainfall policy and unfortunately this means they need to delay the excess rainfall products launch.

The CCRIF had originally hoped that the rainfall product would be ready during 2010 but unfortunately it has been beset with problems causing the launch date to move back. This latest delay was discussed at the CCRIF’s recent board meeting in June and they have told us that they expect to release an announcement about a new plan and timeframe for the excess rainfall product within one month.