European windstorms top international catastrophe loss of 2022 so far

The catastrophe industry loss from the three major European windstorms that struck close together during the month of February 2022 is the largest international cat loss event of the year so far, according to Cresta.

At US $4.1 billion, the insurance and reinsurance market loss from the series of European windstorms named Ylenia, Zeynep and Antonia by the Free University of Berlin, and Dudley, Eunice and Franklin by the UK Met Office, tops the list of international catastrophe insurance losses, although closely followed by the flooding in Australia which was a US $3.7 billion industry loss at the latest count, Cresta said.

After that, the Magnitude 7.3 earthquake that struck the Fukushima region of Japan on March 16th 2022 is now estimated to have caused an insurance and reinsurance industry loss of US $2.3bn.

There are also three new events under investigation by Cresta from the second quarter of 2022 that each have the potential to generate an industry loss in excess of US $1 billion.

Cresta said these include the KwaZulu-Natal floods in South Africa in April, the Ontario/Quebec derecho storm in Canada in May, and the recent severe convective storms in France in June.

Matthias Saenger, Product Manager of CRESTA, commented: “An analysis of the CLIX industry loss database
shows that an event loss of USD 1bn is reached or exceeded on average 4.5 times per year. With three events already confirmed to have exceeded this loss level in Q1 and three more events in Q2 under investigation, it looks entirely possible that 2022 will become an above-average year for international Cat loss activity.”