RMS Lists Top 10 ‘1-in-100-Year’ Events for Asia Pacific Region

Without providing dollar estimates of potential damage from the imagined events, RMS set out to identify events beyond replications of events already seen, including “more unusual events that nonetheless have the potential to be particularly devastating” on the list.

Some were selected for the list “precisely because they are not being prepared for,” RMS said in the announcement, which states that even though disasters like the Palu earthquake in Indonesia and Typhoon Jebi hitting Japan have assailed the region in 2018, at a national scale there are more events to come at the 1 percent level of annual probability.

Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer, RMS, explained: “We picked this list of events to reflect credible catastrophes, not so extreme as to be beyond the concerns of the insurance sector. These are the kinds of events for which nations should also be managing their disaster risk reduction strategies.

“As we develop large stochastic simulations in catastrophe loss models, we discover a very large number of potential extreme events,” he said.

The list, in no particular order, focuses only on single events rather than event combinations, balanced among some of the principal countries in the region, RMS said. Listed by country, the potential events are in:

“This list should be considered illustrative and by no means exclusive,” said Muir-Wood. “From major earthquakes in New Zealand, Sumatra or Japan, to flooding in India and Korea, or volcanic eruption shrouding Bali in ash; any one of these catastrophic events would have major implications for the region, country, people and insurance industry.”

Source: RMS

This article was originally published in Wells Media Group’s Carrier Management, the magazine for property/casualty insurance carrier executives.