LAUSR

Abstract While globally reported flood losses seem to be increasing, the share covered by formal insurance mechanisms seems to be decreasing slightly, leaving the world potentially more financially exposed. As great as the need to improve the management of flood risk is today, it promises to be even greater in the near future due to global warming and sea level rise. Numerical models that estimate the potential impacts of future flood events are some of the most important tools we have to manage, price, and transfer risks but, being fairly new, they show significant dispersion in their results. Understanding, validating, and ultimately internalizing these models requires the (re)insurance industry to recurrently engage in extensive research campaigns. We provide a brief description of the usual anatomy and characteristics of flood risk models in the industry, glimpses of their historical evolution, and a perspective on the most common types of diagnostics used to scrutinize them.