AXA XL, Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies Launch Disaster Recovery Hub

AXA XL has partnered with the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies to launch an online disaster recovery hub based on more than 100 major disaster case studies covering different events in various locations.

The Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies Disaster Recovery Hub includes data visualizations and other tools to assess the role the insurance industry can play in helping communities recover from disasters as quickly as possible. The hub aims to draw from past experiences to guide future recovery efforts.

Examples of case studies included in the hub are the 2004 floods in Bangladesh, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan, 2012's Superstorm Sandy in the United States, the 2013 floods in Germany, and typhoons in the Philippines and Vietnam in 2013 and 2017, respectively. While most of the case studies are from the past 30 years, the hub also includes older case studies such as the Ohio River flood of 1937 in the United States and the Ashgabat earthquake of 1948 in Turkmenistan.

The hub shows that while the Bangladesh floods and Superstorm Sandy had similar damage severity levels—the proportion of the building and infrastructure value lost from the event—the two had very different recovery profiles.

The Bangladesh floods, where the proportion of insured loss was only 0.05 percent, had an economic recovery speed of 6–11 months, and the economic recovery quality was worse than before the disaster. In the case of Superstorm Sandy, where the proportion of insured loss was 46 percent, the economic recovery speed was less than 6 months, and the economic recovery quality was the same as before the disaster.

"We hope the new Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies Disaster Recovery Hub will prove an invaluable tool to public officials, companies, [nongovernmental organizations,] and others who play a role in disaster recovery efforts," Oliver Carpenter, environmental risk research lead at the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, said in a statement. "The assembled case studies provide contrasting narratives of success and failure in recovering quickly from catastrophes and building disaster resilience, and clearly outlines the important role played by insurance in these endeavors."