On flood risk pooling in Europe

In this paper, we review and discuss some challenges in insuring flood risk in Europe on the national level, including high correlation of damages. Making use of recent advances in extreme value theory, we, furthermore, model flood risk with heavy-tailed distributions and their truncated counterparts and apply the discussed techniques to an inflation- and building-value-adjusted annual data set of flood losses in Europe. The analysis leads to Value-at-Risk estimates for individual countries and for Europe as a whole, allowing to quantify the diversification potential for flood risk in Europe. Finally, we identify optimal risk pooling possibilities in case a joint insurance strategy on the European level cannot be realized and quantify the resulting inefficiency in terms of additional necessary solvency capital. Thus, the results also contribute to the ongoing discussion on how public risk transfer mechanisms can supplement missing private insurance coverage

Performance Evaluation of Vision-Based Algorithms for MAVs

An important focus of current research in the field of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is to increase the safety of their operation in general unstructured environments. Especially indoors, where GPS cannot be used for localization, reliable algorithms for localization and mapping of the environment are necessary in order to keep an MAV airborne safely. In this paper, we compare vision-based real-time capable methods for localization and mapping and point out their strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, we describe algorithms for state estimation, control and navigation, which use the localization and mapping results of our vision-based algorithms as input.Comment: Presented at OAGM Workshop, 2015 (arXiv:1505.01065

Spatial dependence modelling of flood risk using max-stable processes: The example of Austria

We propose a new approach to model the dependence structure for aggregating the risk of flood damages from a local level to larger areas, which is based on the structure of the river network of a country and can be calibrated with publicly available data of river discharges. Building upon a suitable adaptation of max-stable processes for a flood-relevant geometry as recently introduced in [1], this enables the assessment of flood risk without the need of a hydrological model, and can easily be adapted for different countries. We illustrate its use for the particular case of Austria. For this purpose, we first develop marginal flood models for individual municipalities by intertwining available HORA risk maps (which represent a detailed zoning of the country into flood risk return level segments) with information about the actual location of buildings. As a second alternative for the marginal modelling, we also advocate an approach based on suitably normalized historical damage claim data of municipalities together with techniques from extreme value statistics. We implement and compare the two alternatives and apply the calibrated dependence structure to each of them, leading to estimates for average flood damage as well as its extreme quantiles on the municipality, state as well as country level. As a by-product, this approach allows to quantify the diversification potential for flood risk on each of these levels, a topic of considerable importance in view of the natural and strong spatial dependence of this particular natural peril. The results of this paper considerably refine earlier respective estimates for Austria

The impacts of climate change on tourist mobility in mountain areas

This study investigates the effects of climate change on tourist mobility in mountain areas, distinguishing between infrastructure, transport operation and travel demand. We examine change in tourist travel demand by proposing a two-step approach to forecast its future development. A multi-origin, multi-destination model for tourism demand quantifies the variation in overnight stays within a given region, and a linear, deterministic model determines the traffic-related implications. The method, tested on the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol (Italy), exhibits expected variations in winter and summer travel demand up to 2080 under different scenarios. Results reveal that average summer traffic can be more than twice as intense as average winter traffic, contributing to significantly increasing the peak days of congestion along the Provincial road network. Despite this evidence, all stakeholders seem to be at an early stage in incorporating this information into their strategic planning. The need for adequate transport policies and measures is considered essential to obtain the optimal balance of transport modes that will be required in the near future

Risk and insurability of storm damages to residential buildings in Austria

This paper develops a stochastic model to assess storm risk in Austria, which relates wind speed and actual losses. By virtue of a building-stock-value-weighted wind index, we use suitably normalised historical loss data of residential buildings over 12 years and corresponding wind speed data to calibrate the model. Subsequently, additional wind speed data is used to generate further scenarios and to obtain loss curves for storm risk that give rise to storm insurance loss quantiles and corresponding solvency capital requirements both on the aggregate and on the regional level. We also investigate the diversification effect across regions and use tools from extreme value theory to assess the insurability of storm risk in Austria in general

Can 7000 Years of Flood History Inform Actual Flood Risk Management? A Case Study on Lake Mondsee, Austria

Flood risk models typically rely on discharge records of time series no longer than a few hundred years, which leads to high uncertainty in the estimates for major flood events. In this paper, we investigate the capability of geological flood records retrieved from lake sediment cores to prolong available data sets, lower the uncertainty of flood risk analysis, and detect changes in flood patterns by releasing the common assumption of stationarity. Paleoflood records covering 7.000 years are linked to flood damage data of the catchment area to calculate (1) the average annual damage, i.e. the fair premium and (2) the damage at 99.5% Value at Risk, i.e. the Solvency II capital requirement for insurance solutions. To illustrate our results, the performance of a hypothetical catastrophe fund for these 7.000 years is studied at current vulnerability levels. Our findings show that high resolution paleoflood records with robust chronologies and flood information have significant impacts on flood model outcomes and that damage potentials derived merely from recent damage data may overestimate actual risks

Flood occurrence change-point analysis in the paleoflood record from Lake Mondsee (NE Alps)

Knowledge about changes of flood occurrence patterns is important for risk estimation of the future. Robust and well- calibrated paleoflood records, derived e.g. from lake sediments, are excellent natural archives to investigate flood variability of the past and to use the data for further modelling. In this paper, we analyse a 7100 year summer flood record recovered from Lake Mondsee (NE Alps), using a statistical approach. We identify a point process of renewal type, with a significant change-point of the occurrence pattern around 350 AD, switching from the overlay of two mechanisms of event recurrences of 5 and 50 years before to 2 and 17 years after this change-point. This changepoint approach enables a comparison to other flood records, and possibly to relate event frequencies to climatic conditions. We also highlight how lower temporal resolution of flood records can hamper the analysis of relations to climatic signals. Hence high-resolution records with robust chronologies and flood information (e.g. seasonality and event characteristics) are essential to improve the understanding of the interplay between climatic signals and flood occurrences, which is an important ingredient for proper risk estimation and risk management