EIOPA Seeks Views on Dashboard to Address Catastrophe Protection Gap

The dashboard brings together data on economic and insured losses, vulnerabilities and exposures, and insurance coverage across EU member states. This approach will help in identifying risky regions at risk and protection gap risk drivers, in addition to defining proactive prevention measures. Such a dashboard should also help to:

• Increase the awareness of the protection gap issues for all stakeholders
• Promote a science-based approach to protection gap management and decision-making
• Identify at-risk regions and identify the underlying protection gap risk drivers
• Develop proactive prevention measures based on a granular assessment of risk drivers
• Identify the potential for synergies between national policies to improve protection against natural catastrophes across borders at European level

The dashboard was discussed and validated by a group of selected experts, EIOPA, and national competent authorities from the European Economic Area countries (September 2020). The dashboard provides two views: a historical protection gap and an estimation of protection gap. In view of climate change, the dashboard could also add a third view with an estimation of the future protection gap. This could be, for example, done for perils that are estimated to be strongly impacted by climate change. This would require not only to study the way the hazard and the exposure would change in the future due to climate change, but also to monitor the evolution of vulnerability and the insurance coverage. These are not easy tasks and data gaps have already been identified when trying to estimate protection gaps, especially for vulnerability data. An analysis of data availability also showed that it is not always straightforward to access data for a specific peril, as the data are often aggregated together. The dashboard would, however, benefit from a more granular approach to perils—for example, clearly distinguishing between coastal floods and river floods. The dashboard focuses mainly on the insurance coverage provided by the private sector. A future area of development would be to better integrate description of national schemes and to have a clear split of the losses insured by the private sector versus losses taken by national schemes.

Related Links

• Press Release
• Overview of Pilot Dashboard (PDF)
• Technical Description (PDF)
• Pilot Dashboard in Excel (XLSM)
• Survey Form

Comment Due Date: March 31, 2021

Keywords: Europe, EU, Insurance, Climate Change Risk, ESG, Dashboard, Catastrophe Risk, EIOPA