Zurich have listed what they see as the ‘Top Ten Mega Disasters’ of the last decade on their website.These events have been selected based on loss of life, overall impact to businesses and the geographic scope and duration of the disasters. It also makes sense that these are some of the biggest insurance loss events experienced in the last ten years.
The disasters ranked chronologically are:
- 9/11 – 2001
- SARS – 2003
- 2003 U.S. / Canada power outage – 2003
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami – 2004
- Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma – 2005
- Financial crisis – 2008
- China earthquake – 2008
- H1N1 pandemic – 2009
- Iceland volcano – 2010
- Floods in Europe and Pakistan – 2010
The list was released by Zurich prior to a conference presentation on the topic of lessons learned from disasters of this size.
From our perspective, it’s interesting to see how many of these mega-disasters could have / did utilise the capital market and alternative risk hedging products available to us today.
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