Climate change and its impact on building water damage

The insurance industry, like other parts of the financial sector, is vulnerable to climate change. Life as well as non-life products are affected, and knowledge of future loss levels is valuable. Risk and premium calculations may be updated accordingly, and dedicated loss-preventive measures can be communicated to customers and regulators. We have established statistical claims models for the coherence be-tween externally inflicted water damage to private buildings and se-lected meteorological variables. Based on such models and downscaled climate predictions from the Hadley centre HadAM3H climate model, the estimated loss level of a future scenario period (2071-2100) is com-pared to that of a recent control period (1961-1990). On a national scale, payments increase by 15 % and 20 % under two different CO2 emissions scenarios, but there is substantial regional variability. Of the uncertainties inherently involved in such predictions, only the er-ror due to model fit is quantifiable