The overarching goal of the Oasis Innovation Hub for Catastrophe and Climate Extremes Risk Assessment Project (H2020_Insurance) was to support the understanding of climate risks by the (re)insurance sector and wider society. This helped decrease the gap between insured and uninsured losses caused by climatic hazards through providing an understanding of associated risks and to increase the uptake of insurances to cover new sectors and regions, with a focus on critical infrastructure, health, natural resources and supply chains to create greater financial resilience and enable societies to recover from extreme climatic events.
The project operationalised a risk calculation software, called the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework. This framework enables the integration of multiple sources of data including environmental hazard, vulnerability and damage data, combined with financial information to provide a risk assessment of potential loss and damage caused by extreme climate and catastrophe events in a given area. This project sought to innovate a new open-source standard for risk assessment, improve climate modelling, damage assessment techniques and accuracy of models. The project operated several demonstrator activities linked to ‘real’ situations. They were co-designed by the scientific community, the insurance sector, end-user communities, municipalities and businesses These demonstrators develop work around hydro-climatic risk (in the Danube Region), typhoon risk in West Pacific, forest risks in North America and Australia, African farmer risk – through using climate information to support the underwriting of micro-insurance, climate-related health risks in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany. Results from these innovations were made available through the Oasis Hub, the eMarket for free and commercial environmental and risk data, tools and services.
Fresh Thoughts led the work on communication and project impact among the targeted sectors.