Hazard Impact Tracker

HIT - Leveraging New Global Cyclone Data to create a Catastrophe Portfolio Management Platform

Mapwork of the Project

• Aim: We aim to empower private customers (insurers, reinsurers) and aid agencies alike to effectively respond to cyclones worldwide with the Hazard Impact Tracker (HIT).
• Relevance: Cyclones are global convective weather phenomena associated with intense winds, extreme precipitation, and storm surges in coastal regions. They are frequently devastating to society, both from economic and loss-of-life perspectives. At the same time, studies show that the deadliest and costliest natural disasters seen in the past 20 years were forecasted. The state of scientific knowledge empowers us to anticipate a disaster and take action before it strikes.
• Such anticipatory action can bring significant benefits across multiple sectors: humanitarian (fewer lives lost), infrastructure (lower reconstruction costs post-event) and finance (effective risk transfer in insurance and reinsurance industries).While there are strong benefits to anticipatory action, there are also objective barriers to deploying it at scale, most significantly: 1) Uncertainty as to when and under what conditions pre-emptive action should be triggered. 2) Inaccessible, inconsistent or incoherent data at a global scale.
• Impact: This consortium brings together experts from the academic sector (LSE, University of Reading), humanitarian sector (Red Cross), and private sector (Maximum Information, AON) to overcome these challenges. We will develop and bring to market a novel product that develops a continuous global cyclone dataset and makes analytics accessible via a responsive user interface.