Weather risk management and weather derivatives trading news

itravel2000, the Canadian online travel agent, has been running a promotion since June called Let It Snow. The promotion promises to give customers their qualifying holidays for free if it snows 5 inches or more at Calgary, Halifax, Montreal or Toronto airports on New Years Day, January 1, 2009. It’s been so successful for them […]

The Weather Risk Management Association has made the presentations from it’s recent annual meeting available on it’s website. For those who couldn’t make the meeting here are links directly to the presentations (in MS Powerpoint). Long Term Management of Weather and Other Risks Robert Shiller, Chief Economist, MacroMarkets LLC Parametric Extreme Events Warren Isom, Executive […]

Jamaica, Antigua, Dominica, Haiti, St Kitts & Nevis, and Turks and Caicos have all taken up the offer from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility to have expanded coverage which should protect them from lower level storms. These six policyholders can now claim on a lower trigger level of a 1 in 15 year storm, […]

It’s really interesting to read about the weather risk management approach being taken in India. Advancements in the sector there put developed countries to shame as they put technology to use to enable rural communities to go some way to managing their own risks. The latest strategy being employed involves farmers being sent SMS text […]

Munich Re, Munich Re America, and the Insurance Information Institute teamed up to present a webinar that provided the press with an overview of the first half 2008 natural catastrophes yesterday. The upshot is that losses from the first half of this year equaled around $50B with $13B of it insured. This is one of […]

The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility has not been triggered by Tropical Strom Arthur’s landfall on the Central American country of Belize at the start of June. Despite tropical storm force winds and heavy rain which caused heavy flooding, estimates of losses from the Belize government were put at approximately $60m. Arthur qualified as an […]

Guaranteeing the weather at tennis tournament Wimbledon in the UK may seem an impossible feat given the usual fortunes of the spectators. The last week of June in the UK is notorious for rain (given the fact that both Wimbledon and the Glastonbury festival occur at that time). This year of course the spectators have […]

I posted earlier about the lack of uptake of the weather insurance scheme in India and now a story emerges on a similar topic in Jamaica with Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. It is vital to get these schemes right for these nations where farmers are poorer and are exposed to more natural disasters. The […]

There’s a report here on the lack of uptake of the new weather insurance scheme in India. It seems that it’s proving a tough job to move farmers over from the existing scheme to the new one due to the more generic claims trigger in the old version. I believe this is a similar case […]

The recent Midwest floods have been pretty catastrophic and re/insurers are nervous at the extent of losses that may emerge as the full impact gets calculated and the claims start being filed. Storm Exchange, the weather risk management service company, have released a report detailing the extent of lossees that can be expected and of […]