JBA broadens access to Sri Lanka flood model to help bridge protection gap

Thursday, 21 February 2019 01:26 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

JBA Risk Management has released its Sri Lanka Flood Model onto Simplitium’s ModEx platform. The initiative is specifically aimed at broadening accessibility to the Sri Lanka model for both the insurance and wider disaster risk reduction (DRR) community.

The announcement follows close collaboration between the Insurance Development Forum (IDF) and JBA on modelling the Sri Lanka National Natural Disaster Insurance Scheme (NNDIS) – a state-funded scheme providing protection for low income Sri Lanka households, backed by the international reinsurance market.

The model has been converted to an open “Oasis” format and updated to include new vulnerability functions, specific to the low-income houses and micro-enterprises covered under the NNDIS scheme in Sri Lanka. The model, which is the first probabilistic flood model for the country, helps analyse the potential flood losses to the scheme and in doing so provides greater understanding of risk to the international reinsurance market.

Dr. Iain Willis, managing director, Asia-Pacific, at JBA Risk Management commented: “This marks a significant milestone in what has been a very fruitful collaboration between the IDF and JBA. Launching the Sri Lanka Flood model on ModEx provides a wider platform for the reinsurance market to access this model, ultimately helping build greater flood resilience in Sri Lanka.”

Ian Branagan, chief risk officer at RenaissanceRe, and co-chair of the IDF Risk Modelling Steering Group, said the model is crucial for a data-poor but flood-prone country.

“As part of our support of the IDF, RenaissanceRe is proud to fund development of JBA’s Sri Lanka Flood Model, its application to the Sri Lankan National Natural Disaster Insurance Scheme (NNDIS), and its conversion to an open source format on the Oasis platform,” said Branagan.

“One of our founding tenets is improving the understanding of natural hazard risk through robust catastrophe models,” he added. “We hope our efforts to improve analysis of risks like Sri Lankan floods will help to enhance disaster risk financing and community resilience in low and middle-income countries while lowering barriers to high-quality hazard and risk information.”

Branagan added that supporting the development of open source models can enable improvements in local modelling capabilities: “It encourages greater ownership of the understanding and management of disaster risk by government agencies, thereby fostering efforts to reduce the natural disaster protection gap.”

Sri Lanka experiences major flooding on a regular basis, with significant events occurring annually since 2015. Insurance penetration is low but growing, with total gross written premiums increasing 15 percent in 2017.

The Sri Lanka Flood Model is available on Simplitium’s ModEx platform as well as JBA’s catastrophe modelling platform, JCalf and Oasis.

Matthew Jones, head of product development at Simplitium commented: “This is a great example of successful collaboration in the industry benefiting the reinsurance community and can be seen as a pathfinder solution for other low and middle-income regions around the world. We are proud to be able to support this important initiative with our ModEx platform and help improve the access to cat models such as JBA’s Sri Lanka Flood.”