‘Disastrous’ 1st half of 2011 for Lloyd’s of London

Cargo containers thrown around by the tsunami in Japan. Photograph: Itsuo Inouye/AP

This article in the Guardian Newspaper reports on an aspect of the economic impacts of natural disasters.  It reports that Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market, has experienced the costliest 6 months in its 323 year history.

This is an indication of the economic impact of increases in the frequency of high energy environmental hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes.  However, the question is whether the evidence suggests that this is an ongoing trend or if this last 6 months is an unusual period.

Another issue this reports raises is the question over proposals to use insurance more to reduce economic vulnerability of natural disasters.  This is an approach that has been researched recently by organisations such as the World Bank, CGIAR’s International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the UK’s Department for International Development.  The MicroFinance Gateway have a theme on microinsurance, that explore the issues in digestible short reosurces and has loinks to more materials.

Lloyd’s of London have their own resources on insurance issues.  This theme on Climate Change and insurance is worth reviewing.

How important can insurance be in helping individuals, households and communities reduce their vulnerability to natural hazards?  If the evidence suggests that the energy and scale of natural disaster events is increasing, what might be the impact on the insurance industry and therefore the knock-on effects on the economy?

Climate Science, Population and Cities

This article in the Guardian Newspaper aims to explore the link between climate, population and the growth in urbanisation.  However, a brief review of the comments at the bottom of the article will illustrate that this is far from a simple matter.  There is a lot of rhetoric in the comments – that artful construction of language, which implies that it is not necessarily underpinned by clear link to the realities fo the situation.

As developing Geographers, it is important that you are able to understand these kinds of debates.  It is important that although you may not know all the science and social science behind these themes, you have a sufficient grounding to be able to contribute sensibly to the conversation and to be able to research a topic and recognise the wheat from the chaff – or the real knowledge and evidence from the carefully constructed language or politically motivated positioning.  For example, you may wish to read the original paper in the journal Climate Change by the Boston researcher, Andersen (2011) to assess the way in which the journalist has interpreted the science and presented it to the public.

This raises a number of questions; for example: what is the link between population and climate change?  Is there a link between urbanisation and climate change?  How accurate is the phrase:

“Some of this hazard exists because the number of potential victims is also swelling …”

How do you assess the following statement and how can this be addressed:

“… seven out of 10 Americans now think that climate scientists … are likely to have faked their research data to support a belief in global warming.”

While reflecting on this article, here is a critique from Stoat, a blog on science in particular, the science of climate change, the blogger examines the source of some of the Guardian’s article and arrives at different conclusions – and data!

Follow the links to Munich Re’s report and the IPCC’s report.