Developing a Public-Private Earthquake Insurance Pool

Project Narrative

To support the development of the public‐private earthquake pool pilot in the Philippines, the scope of the financing gap for SMEs and middle‐income homeowners with respect to earthquake insurance, needs to be identified. Previously, large industrials in the Philippines had an established disaster risk cover provided by the major insurance companies and reinsured internationally via a machinery pool. The potential however, to expand disaster risk cover to other beneficiaries is constrained by the low capitalization and fragmentation of the insurance industry in the Philippines.

Key services provided

Overall Project Management of the activity and management of the consultant inputs, including financial management, quality reporting, and assignment of resources.

The work was undertaken in 3 phases, commencing with the Inception Study phase for levelling off on work plans and collaborative agreements and contributions is essential for this project where there are many stakeholders and also many opportunities for innovation and gains in efficiency from tapping into existing data sources. Following this was the Technical Development phase important for obtaining understandings and agreements on technical matters important to realise local ‘ownership’ of the results and for sustaining the new processes. The next phase was the Field Operations and Data Processing Phase. This was the main phase where the results are were produced. The GIS was used to (i) provide map sheets to map each building; (ii) control the operation by mapping each sample area; (iii) assist in computer control of the extrapolation process; and (iv) display final results. Parallel data entry and data processing took place to speed up the work.

The outputs of the project included:

• sample data for an area in each city such as location, risk features (proximity to West Valley Fault, area of liquefaction), land area, buildings types, replacement value /floor area of buildings;
• extrapolation of sample data to whole city, controlled using GIS and possibly also GA data and any LGU data;
• assessment of the available secondary data sources at the time and future prospects (i.e. LGU data, OCD data);
• assessment of people’s attitudes to obtaining disaster risk insurance through a small interview survey of property owners.
• advising the Philippines Government on how best to support the insurance initiative and identifying the major areas of urban management risk and uncertainty and how to contain the risks and error sources.