Risk can be quantified by location for any year and climate warming scenario up to 2100 – a first for custom flood risk simulations.
Fathom has integrated future climate scenarios into its Global Flood Cat, making it the first flood catastrophe model to include them at a global scale. This major advancement enables insurers, investors, banks and planners to assess flood risk dynamically, by year, location and climate warming outcome.
Underpinned by Fathom’s best-in-class Climate Dynamics framework, the model allows users to simulate flood risk views across all major flood perils: fluvial, pluvial and coastal. The framework offers unprecedented flexibility, supporting custom risk views that incorporate user-specific vulnerability, event loss scaling, hazard scaling and location-specific flood defenses.
Global Flood Cat | Future, Join the launch webinar
Join us for the official launch of Global Flood Cat x Climate Dynamics, where we’ll show how this integration supports insurers, banks, investors, and engineers in assessing physical flood risk in a warming world.
A transformative development for climate-informed decision making
This integration marks a major milestone in the development of quantitative flood risk models. Financial institutions, including banks and investors, can now assess portfolio-level risk, especially for real estate, make long term investment decisions, and meet evolving regulatory requirements. Engineering firms and federal planners will be able to use the data for mitigation, resilience planning and adaptation, and to assess risk to infrastructure and supply chains under different climate conditions. Insurers can apply the model to run stress tests, identify accumulation hotspots and model long term shifts in exposure.
“Being able to quantify physical climate risk into the future is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for many of the risk professionals that we work with”, explains Dr Malcolm Haylock, Head of Catastrophe Modeling at Fathom. “We are excited to offer clients a powerful tool that enables them to understand not just the potential losses associated with a particular climate scenario, but also to assess the uncertainty arising from variability across climate models.”
Flood losses projected to rise sharply without adaptation
Assessing future risk against climate scenarios is critical. Fathom’s preliminary analysis suggests that global average annual flood losses are expected to double by the year 2100 without any adaptation steps to reduce exposure or increase defenses. Low-lying urban environments are particularly susceptible due to sea level rise. Country-level 200-year losses are projected to increase by around 40% on average.
“Decades of research have shown that climate change and urbanization are the two most significant drivers of future flood risk”, added Dr Haylock. “With transition plans well underway in many sectors, understanding the impact future climate change might have on physical risk is crucial.“
