2023 Australasian Actuarial Education and Research Symposium

Ilan Noy - Plenary Session 1

Victoria University of Wellington

What is disaster insurance good for? Can it be improved?

In King Lear, Shakespeare observed that "we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity." After the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010-2012 the majority of Cantabrians’ primary cause of stress was their need to deal with insurance. It was not ‘the moon, the sun and the stars’, nor the repeating movement of the tectonic plates under their feet. In this talk we will make ten observations on what may have gone wrong in Christchurch in the aftermath of the earthquakes. By focussing on these observations we can improve our disaster insurance systems. This is critical, as both the frequencies and intensities of some types of extreme weather events are increasing because of anthropogenic climate change.