Last year’s natural catastrophes cost insurers $90bn, the fourth most expensive year recorded by Aon.
The only worse years by Aon’s reckoning were 2017 ($147bn), 2011 ($148bn), and 2005 ($135bn).
The company’s Weather Climate and Catastrophe Insight annual report called 2018 an “elevated, yet manageable catastrophe loss year”.
The broker’s numbers were higher than Munich Re, which estimated $80bn, and Swiss Re, at $79bn.
All but $1bn of the total insured losses last year, and all but $10bn of the $225bn economic cost, stemmed from weather-related disasters.
The difference between total losses and insured ones was $135bn, the lowest protection gap since 2005.
Aon counts a natural disaster as an event that inflicts either at least $50m of economic losses or $25m of insured loss; or take at least 10 lives or injure 50 or more people; or trigger 2,000 or more insurance claims or damages to structures.
The US suffered most, in being site of the three economically costliest incidents of 2018 – hurricanes Michael ($17bn), Florence ($15bn) and the Camp wildfire ($15bn).
The Camp fire was the costliest event in terms of insured losses ($12bn) – the first year that a wildfire has led the table.
But it was Indonesia’s tsunami in September that was by far the deadliest, taking 2,256 souls.
By peril type, cyclones / hurricanes overshadowed all else, bringing $30bn of damage in 2018. Aon said that peril had been the costliest for insurers this century, too.
Aggregated tropical cyclone costs for the industry in 2017 and 2018 accounted for 30% of the last 19 years’ worth of payouts for the peril, and 10% of all payouts for the industry regardless of peril, Aon calculated.
Companies:Aon
