Public insurance and climate change (part one): Past trends in weather-related insurance in New Zealand

David Fleming, Ilan Noy, Jacob Pastor-Paz () and Sally Owen ()
Additional contact information
Jacob Pastor-Paz: Victoria University of Wellington
Sally Owen: Motu Economic and Public Policy Research
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Adam Jaffe

No 18_09, Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: Climate change appears to be increasing the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, negatively affecting communities as well as posing long-term sustainability challenges to insurance (risk transfer) mechanisms. New Zealand’s public natural hazard insurer, the Earthquake Commission (EQC), covers homeowners for damage to land (and in some cases to dwellings and contents) caused by landslip, storm or flood. We comprehensively explore the EQC claims data to investigate these weather-related claims from 2000-2017. We find no clear upward trend yet emerging in the number of claims or their value. We find that the northern regions of both islands are the source of most claims, that only a handful of weather events caused a large proportion of EQC’s weather-related pay-outs, that the average property lodging a weather-related claim is located twice as close to the coast as the national average, and that properties with claims usually are cited on much steeper land than the typical property in New Zealand. We also explore their relation between claims and socio-economic characteristics, finding that higher income neighbourhoods appear to be those most benefiting from the EQC coverage for weather events.

Keywords: climate change; extreme weather; natural hazards; public insurance; New Zealand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G22 G28 Q51 Q54 Q58 R28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://motu-www.motu.org.nz/wpapers/18_09.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtu:wpaper:18_09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maxine Watene ().