Severe thunderstorms caused an economic loss of more than £1.6bn across Europe in June, according to Aon Benfield’s monthly Impact Forecasting catastrophe report.
The report reveals that an outbreak of severe thunderstorms affected several parts of Europe during the first half of the month, causing significant hail damage in parts of Germany, France and Belgium, and killing at least six people in Germany.
The worst losses were suffered in France, Germany and Belgium accumulating to over £1.6bn. The French Federation of Insurance Companies said that 363,000 residential, automobile and business claims had been filed in France alone as a result of the severe weather, with insurance pay-outs forecast at more than £700m.
These events marked the second consecutive summer in which parts of Europe have endured major insured losses as a result of hail. In 2013, insurers paid more than £2.3bn in claims from hailstorms, again mostly in Germany and France.
Head of Impact Forecasting, Adam Podlaha, explained that due to the level of loses resulting from hail there is now an increasing opportunity to develop models which can help insurers evaluate their exposures more accurately. "With exponential advances in computing power, model developers will gradually be able to address the challenge of modelling this natural hazard at the high spatial resolution required to make the results meaningful," Podlaha said.
Meanwhile, the United States endured several rounds of convective weather during June, with tornadoes, hail and damaging winds leading to aggregate economic losses expected to reach the multi-billions of dollars, with insurance losses exceeding £600m.
Elsewhere, monsoonal rains caused significant damage in China, killing dozens of people and resulting in economic losses of more than £1.6bn.
Impact Forecasting, the catastrophe model development centre of excellence at Aon Benfield, has released the latest edition of its monthly Global Catastrophe Recap report, which reviews the natural disaster perils that occurred worldwide during June 2014 and aggregates the insured and economic losses for each region.
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