Insurance & Reinsurance

The Insurance and Re-Insurance industry has, for the past decade, been a priority for the activities in VAE. It is evident that EO can provide key environmental information for the assessment and monitoring of many types of natural and man-made disasters.

The collaboration with this sector has been through an informal working group, including prominent companies responsible for different aspects within the sector, including (but not limited to) Willis (global risk advisors), Swiss Re (global reinsurer), Guy Carpenter (reinsurance broking, analytics), and Allianz (insurance and asset management worldwide).

The discussions on the types of EO-based information have been wide-ranging, but activity has focused on flood monitoring (flood events represent more than half of all of the activations of the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters). In June of 2013, Central Europe was hit by a major flood affecting parts of Germany, Austria, Czeck Republic and Poland. Led by Swiss Re, ESA carried out a live near real-time demonstration of what EO could deliver for daily flood mapping of designated cities, and (1 month after the event) a consolidated map of the maximum flood extent.