Building Australia’s resilience to natural disasters needs collaboration

The current state of play in respect to the way we deal with disasters, especially when it comes to the resilience element, resembles Abraham Maslow’s often repeated observation ‘when the only tool you have is a hammer then all the problems start to look like nails’.  Over the past decade we have seen an increase in discussions on how best to deal with natural disasters. A key argument has emerged with a strong global consensus (Hyogo and Sendai are examples of a formal global agreement) that a collaborative approach…

Chubb sees higher catastrophe losses from storms, wildfires

Property and casualty insurer Chubb Ltd. estimated natural catastrophe losses for the second quarter to be about 54% higher than the first quarter, indicating another quarter of high losses due to natural disasters for insurers.  Multiple weather events in the United States, which included hail storms in Texas, earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador, floods in Europe and wildfires in Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, were among the natural catastrophes covered in the company’s loss estimate…