Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s highlights the opportunity for insurance, reinsurance and the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market to work with governments to provide and support sovereign catastrophe and disaster risk financing tools.

Reinsurance firm Swiss Re’s sigma has estimated that the first-half of 2014 resulted in around $44 billion of economic losses and $21 billion of insured losses from natural catastrophe and man-made disaster events.

The first-half of 2014 saw reduced profitability in the global reinsurance sector, according to Fitch Ratings, but while still profitable the results show deteriorating underwriting returns, as higher non-cat losses and underlying loss ratios began to bite.

Risk modelling, analytics and catastrophe risk management firm RMS has been working alongside China Property and Casualty Reinsurance Company (China Re P&C) in a project seeking to reduce uncertainty in its China typhoon risk model.

Estimates of the insured loss from Sunday mornings M6.0 earthquake which struck the South Napa, California area are rising, with the highest estimate now calling for an economic loss of $4 billion or more and an insurance industry loss of $2.1 billion.

Yesterday’s M6.0 earthquake which struck the northern California, Napa Valley area, the largest earthquake to strike the Bay Area in 25 years, could cause economic losses of over $1 billion, while estimates of insured losses suggest $500m to $1 billion of impact.

Tropical storm Cristobal, the third named storm of the 2014 Atlantic Tropical Storm & Hurricane Season, has formed in the eastern Caribbean and weather models have converged on a track between the U.S. and Bermuda, so no major impact is expected.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 24th August 2014, on catastrophe bonds, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics, from the last seven days on Artemis. To ensure you never miss a thing  subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates.