David Moncoulon

Caisse Centrale de Reassurance · Cat Risk Analysis & Modelling

Clay shrinkage, which consists of a reduction in the volume of clay soils during dry periods, can affect buildings and cause subsidence damage. In France, losses due to subsidence are estimated at more than EUR 16 billion for the period 1989–2021 (CCR, 2021) and are expected to increase under the effect of climate warming. This work aims to improve...

Clay shrinkage, which consists of a reduction in the volume of clay soils during dry periods, can affect buildings and cause subsidence damage. In France, losses due to subsidence are estimated at more than 16 billion € for the period 1989–2021 (CCR, 2021), and are expected to increase under the effect of climate warming. This work aims to improve...

This chapter investigates the enabling conditions and policy settings that are more conducive to the uptake of NAS and discusses how to effectively engage with the insurance sector as part of that process. It covers frequently cited issues that limit NBS implementation that also directly relate to NAS and offers insights on how to address them. It...

Evidence are dearly needed to understand under which conditions it is relevant for decisions makers to invest in NBS for water-related risk. This chapter presents the methodological framework developed for the economic assessment of NBS for water-related risks and its application to seven case studies. We particularly develop methods for the evalua...

The Lez catchment is characterized by a rapid urbanization, due to the attractiveness of the city of Montpellier, and is exposed to a typical Mediterranean weather with high risk of flash flood and other emerging issues, such as air pollution, heat island effects and biodiversity losses. We present the evaluation of two types of NBS to address thes...

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters and can threaten the functions of ecosystems. Affected, damaged or destroyed ecosystems in turn also make our societies more vulnerable to natural hazards and climate change (i.e. their assurance value). In addition, expanding communities and concentrations of wealth in h...

The Brague River basin (68 km ² ) is located on the French Mediterranean coast. It experiences a high risk of flash floods. The potential efficacy and efficiency of flood protection strategies based on green (Nature Based Solutions: NBS) or grey (civil-engineering) measures, as well as their co-benefits, are studied in this chapter. Two NBS flood a...

Extreme droughts have a strong impact on agricultural production. In France, the 2003 drought generated records of yield losses at a national scale for grassland (more than 30%) and for cereals (more than 10% for soft winter wheat and winter barley). These extreme events raise the question of farm resilience in the future. Studying them makes it po...

Wildfires generating damage to assets are extremely rare in France. The peril is not covered by the French natural catastrophes insurance scheme (law of 13 July 1982). In the context of the changing climate, Caisse Centrale de Réassurance—the French state-owned reinsurance company involved in the Nat Cat insurance scheme—decided to develop its know...

Economic narratives are largely put forward as an argument for the promotion of Nature Based Solutions (NBS). However, integrated economic evidence, taking into account direct and opportunity costs, avoided damages and the multiplicity of co-benefits generated by NBS are still needed to support this argument and convince decision makers to invest i...

Motivated by risk assessment of coastal flooding, we consider time-consuming simulators with a spatial output. The aim is to perform sensitivity analysis (SA), quantifying the influence of input parameters on the output. There are three main issues. First, due to computational time, standard SA techniques cannot be directly applied on the simulator...

This chapter outlines a conceptual framework to analyze the different roles that the insurance sector can play in relation to nature-based solutions (NBS) and to build resilience in the context of climate change and probable increased level of damages, considering the potential to mitigate water risks as eco-DRR and climate change adaptation. It in...

En France, le régime d'indemnisation des catastrophes naturelles couvre depuis 1982 les principaux périls naturels (inondations, sécheresses géotechniques, tremblements de terre, submersions marines et cyclones dans les territoires d'Outre-Mer). Le groupe CCR (Caisse Centre de Réassurance) est un réassureur public, au cœur de ce dispositif, proposa...

Motivated by risk assessment of coastal flooding, we consider time-consuming simulators with a spatial output. The aim is to perform sensitivity analysis (SA), quantifying the influence of input parameters on the output. There are three main issues. First, due to computational time, standard SA techniques cannot be directly applied on the simulator...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly being considered as an option to reduce societies’ vulnerability to natural hazards, creating co-benefits while protecting ecosystem services in a context of changing climate patterns with more frequent and extreme weather events. The reinsurance and insurance industries are increasingly cited as sector...

Extreme weather events have strong impacts on agriculture and crop insurance. In France, drought (2003, 2011, 2017, and 2018) and excess of water (2016) are considered the most significant events in terms of economic losses. The crop (re)insurance industry must estimate its financial exposure to climatic events in terms of the average annual losses...

Afin d'anticiper les dommages engendrés par les phénomènes de submersion marine et d'y faire face, CCR a développé un modèle spécifique à ce péril pour la France métropolitaine. Ce modèle présente deux volets : une modélisation déterministe permettant d'estimer le coût d'un événement quelques jours après sa survenance et une modélisation probabilis...

Up to now, flash flood monitoring and forecasting systems, based on rainfall radar measurements and distributed rainfall–runoff models, generally aimed at estimating flood magnitudes – typically discharges or return periods – at selected river cross sections. The approach presented here goes one step further by proposing an integrated forecasting c...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to systematize the use of Nature-based solutions (NBS) by integrating their resilience potential into Natural Assurance Scheme (NAS), focusing on insurance value as corner stone for both awareness-raising and valuation. As such one of its core goal is to align research and pilot projects with infrastructur...

Up to now, flash flood monitoring and forecasting systems, based on rainfall radar measurements and distributed rainfall-runoff models, generally aimed at estimating flood magnitudes - typically discharges or return periods – at selected river cross-sections. The approach presented here goes one step ahead by proposing an integrated forecasting cha...

CCR (Caisse Centrale de Réassurance) is a French reinsurance company playing a major role in the natural catastrophe coverage in France. Since 2003, CCR has been developing tools for the estimation of its exposure to climatic risks. These tools cover three main perils: flood, storm surge and drought. Models are used to estimate the insurance losses...

With an annual loss averaging 580 M€ between 1990 and 2014, floods are the main natural catastrophe (Nat Cat) risk for the French Nat Cat compensation scheme. As part of its role in this scheme, the Caisse Centrale de Réassurance (CCR) offers state guaranteed reinsurance programs and has been modelling the risk of flooding since 2003. This model is...

CCR, a French reinsurance company mostly involved in natural disasters coverage in France, has been developing tools for the estimation of its exposure to climatic risks for many years. Both a flood and a drought models were developed and calibrated on a large policies and claims database supplied every year with insurers’ data. More recently, CCR...

Flash floods monitoring systems developed up to now generally enable a real-time assessment of the potential flash-floods magnitudes based on highly distributed hydrological models and weather radar records. The approach presented here aims to go one step ahead by offering a direct assessment of the potential impacts of flash floods on inhabited ar...

Hydrometeorological forecasting is an essential component of real-time flood management. The information it provides is of great help for crisis managers to anticipate the inundations and the associated risks. In the particular case of flash-floods, which may affect a large amount of small watersheds spread over the territory (up to 300 000 km of w...

Facing climate change and increasing costs of natural disasters, the exposure evolution analysis requires having a long-term knowledge of the impacts of extreme events. By associating historical and modeling approaches, we aim to build a long term chronology of natural disaster severity and damages. To highlight this new methodology, the overseas d...

A model has been developed in order to estimate insurance-related losses caused by coastal flooding in France. The deterministic part of the model aims at identifying the potentially flood-impacted sectors and the subsequent insured losses a few days after the occurrence of a storm surge event on any part of the French coast. This deterministic com...

The analysis of flood exposure at a national scale for the French insurance market must combine the generation of a probabilistic event set of all possible (but which have not yet occurred) flood situations with hazard and damage modeling. In this study, hazard and damage models are calibrated on a 1995–2010 historical event set, both for hazard re...

The analysis of flood exposure at a national scale for the French insurance market must combine the generation of a probabilistic event set of all possible but not yet occurred flood situations with hazard and damage modeling. In this study, hazard and damage models are calibrated on a 1995-2012 historical event set, both for hazard results (river...

Catastrophe models are important tools used by the reinsurance industry for assessing and managing risk. Here, we present the methods used to develop high-resolution wind hazard maps for the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion. As the recent Cyclone Dumile (January 2013) reminded us, the island is at considerable risk from the extreme weather associa...

En France, la plupart des périls naturels (inondations, sécheresse, mouvements de terrain, séismes, cyclones) sont pris en charge par les assureurs dans le cadre du régime des Catastrophes Naturelles. Du fait de son rôle central dans l'indemnisation des Catastrophes Naturelles, la CCR développe des outils de modélisation pour d'une part estimer le...

In France, most natural hazards (flood, subsidence, landslides, earthquakes, cyclones) are supported by insurance companies within natural catastrophes compensation scheme. Because of its central role, CCR is developping modeling tools to firstly estimate the cost of an event a few days after its occurrence and measure its financial exposure. For t...

To evaluate the acid deposition reduction negotiated for 2010 within the UNECE LRTAP Gothenburg Protocol, sulphur and nitrogen deposition timeseries (1880–2100) were compared to critical loads of acidity on five French ecosystems: Massif Central basalt (site 1) and granite (2); Paris Bassin tertiary sands (3); Vosges mountains sandstone (4) and Lan...

A numerical model of chemical weathering in soil horizons and underlying bedrock (WITCH) has been coupled to a numerical model of water and carbon cycles in forest ecosystems (ASPECTS) to simulate the concentration of major species within the soil horizons and the stream of the Strengbach granitic watershed, located in the Vosges Mountains (France)...

Critical loads of acidity represent the maximum acceptable atmospheric deposition for an ecosystem type. Two hundred and forty-one ecosystem types have been defined in France using pedologic, geologic and vegetation data. Weathering rate plays the most important part in soil buffering capacity, but for poor weatherable soils, non-marine atmospheric...

Within the framework of the United Nation Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution, France is part of the Working Group on Effect which aims at evaluating the impact of atmospheric deposition on ecosystems by calculating critical loads. The critical loads are the highest deposition of compounds that will not cause chemical changes in so...