Weather protection: a need for awareness
While nobody has escaped the news that changes to the weather around the globe are creating new and increased risks, there is a definite need to raise awareness of the fact that these risks are manageable.
That is the view of Stuart Brown, head of Weather & Energy Origination for EMEA- APAC for Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, who will be presenting a session on the subject of weather at this year’s AIRMIC conference in Birmingham.
The workshop, titled Managing mother nature: effective risk management solutions, will take place on Monday afternoon (Monday June 16).
“I’m in the consciousness raising business,” he said. “There are a lot of people– particularly those who are not in the energy industry - who aren’t fully aware that these are manageable risks. These people need to know more about the techniques you can use.”
In his workshop Brown will talk people from various industries through a series of examples and case studies that show how companies both in energy and elsewhere have used weather products to manage weather risk.
“It’s hard to find a business that is not somehow affected by the weather – it’s pretty ubiquitous, from what happened to the European utilities with a warm winter this year to what happened to retailers around too much or no enough snowy in the Christmas season,” he said.
“Weather is a big factor, and severe weather conditions are slowly but surely increasing. It’s not just catastrophic weather it’s also factors such as volatility in normal temperature or rainfall events that can be drivers of corporate performance.
“The level of inquiry about protection always spikes after a severe winter or an unusual season, so it is growing,” he added.
Despite this demand, he said that there has not been a need for significant growth in capacity, and the industry's established product offering is well equipped to cover a wide range of client needs. For the products that exist, the key challenge for buyers is to understand the complex way in which these financial instruments respond to weather phenomena.
His workshop at AIRMIC will help them achieve that.
“Swiss Re Corporate Solutions is the world’s leader in providing weather protection and AIRMIC is a target rich environment for us,” he said. “On the back of a winter that’s been characterised by some harsh rainfall and flooding and windstorms plus an unusually warm track over the course of the seasons, we decided we really ought to raise awareness among our UK clients.”
