future danube

HISTORY: OASIS+

Oasis+ is a Pan-European consortium of reinsurance, insurance, catastrophe & climate modelling companies, academic, research institutions and SME’s that have been working together since 2012 to improve the understanding of catastrophe and climate risk. Among the partners of the consortium are:

Pannon Pro Innovations, PIK Potsdam, Imperial College London, Technical University of Denmark, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Municipality of Budapest, Budapest Sewage Works, Budapest Water Works.

Oasis+ seeks to provide municipalities, industry and the financial sector with models, tools and services to assist climate adaptation and disaster resilience planning, risk transfer and the accurate underwriting of risk through insurance and reinsurance sector.

Using existing (Re)insurance methodologies of assessing risk through detailed catastrophe and climate models Oasis+ seeks to improve the availability of these catastrophe modelling tools to other sectors, through increasing the access to and transparency of catastrophe models and their underlying assumptions and by working towards a recognized standard for assessing this type of risk and the potential costs of damage associated with climate risks.

PROVEN TOOL:
THE OASIS LOSS MODELLING FRAMEWORK

The major result of this collaboration is an open source catastrophe modelling software, the ‘Oasis Loss Modelling Framework’, has been developed that enables the plug and play of hazard, vulnerability, damage, exposure and financial models and can crunch data and models to provide ground-up loss data and financial damage of event scenarios. Oasis LMF now has a membership of 44 global (Re)insurers and 60 associate members from the global modelling and software development sectors.

The Oasis Loss Modelling framework provides an ‘open source tool’ for risk assessment calculations, which can accommodate most data and models thus enabling the direct comparison of modelled results, leading to increased accuracy in data and models used for risk assessment. The framework already includes a variety of models with a good global coverage.

Learn more about Loss Modelling Framework here.

H2020 INSURANCE PROJECT

In 2017 the consortium started a 3 year-long Horizon 2020 project. This project intends to operationalize a system called the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework (LMF), that combines climate services with damage and loss information and provides a standardized risk assessment process that can:

• • assess potential losses,
• • areas at most risk,
• • and quantify financial losses of modelled scenarios.

We intend to prove the Oasis LMF system through undertaking a range of demonstrators linked and co-designed to ‘real’ situations and end-user communities in the insurance, municipalities and business sectors (see list of partners & collaborators). These demonstrators have already been agreed with our end-users and develop work in the following areas:

• • hydro-climatic risk (in the Danube Region),
• • Typhoon Risk,
• • African Farmer Risk – through using climate information to support the underwriting of micro-insurance,
• • climate v health,
• • and climate v forest asset risk assessment.

Future Danube Model

Future Danube is one of the demonstration activities of H2020 Insurance. Its aim is to demonstrate the added value of climate services to the insurance sector and beyond by applying a multi-hazard and risk model suite for the Danube region. The Future Danube Model is tailored to end-users with a focus on insurers, in order to help them calculate adequate levels of capital and adaptation measures enabling them to survive under changing climate conditions.

We concentrate on hazards such as fluvial and pluvial floods, droughts and heatwaves under current and climate change conditions, which are linked to the vulnerability functions to build up a full-scale catastrophe model for the Danube basin, with a catchment area of 817,000 km2 and more than 83 million inhabitants.

A further focus is to demonstrate the usefulness of the Future Danube Model for other sectors, for example, to support adaptation decision making in the public, industrial, finance and investment sectors.

The Future Danube Model represents a state-of-the-art catastrophe model that is compliant with insurance industry standards as well as best practices from the climate and hydrological sciences. Uniquely, the high-resolution model is able to not only assess the risk based on historical events and environmental data, but it also uses scenarios of the 21st century to assess flood risk in the current climate period (2006-2035), the near future (2020-2049) and the far future (2070-2099). By doing so it takes account of the effects of climate change considering two alternative scenarios (moderate emission reductions and business as usual). As it customary in the insurance industry, the model also uses a stochastic weather generator to increase the number of extreme events to produce a synthetic meteorological event set of 10’000 years. They are produced for four climate models, four climate periods and two climate change scenarios. They are then used to drive the hazard models which in turn feed a probabilistic loss and damage model. In principle, this approach can be applied to other river basins in Europe with the same data sources (and outside Europe with slightly different sources). This would require a new model setup and calibration; both processes are semi-automated.

How does it work?

RESULTS

Within H2020 Insurance Project a Case Study was made to the Novi Sad Municipality for the new Novi Sad Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP). Preparation works for the connection of the WWTP, Construction of New Pumping Station NGC1 and Connection of South and North catchment, have started on 17th December, 2019.

Source: Graditelj NS

New main pumping station construction site (Novi Sad, Serbia)

The construction of the new Waste Water Treatment Plant will be initiated in the Q1 2021 using the recommendations that were given by the Case Study. It is based on the European Commission official guideline: Making vulnerable investments climate resilient. The predictions using the Future Danube model and OASIS Loss Model Framework will be used as support for the precipitation and temperature modelling and subsequent flood risk assessment in the Novi Sad area.

The results obtained within the Case Study demonstrate the added value of climate services to the investment sector by applying a multi-hazard and risk model suite for the Danube region. In this case, climate services provided added value for the decision-making processes, in terms of enhanced effectiveness, optimized technological opportunities and minimized risks and by serving as the means of involving and better-informing end-users and stakeholders. The specific goal of the Study was to improve climate change resilience of the WWTP and to facilitate better overall hygienic conditions in Novi Sad and to safeguard the potable water resources and the quality of the environment in the areas located downstream and under the influence of the Danube River.

In order to achieve it, preliminary activities were oriented on analyzing the current climate and hydrological conditions, engaging the relevant data providers, stakeholders and policy makers and evaluating what relevant local data would be useful for the study.

Source: Graditelj NS & Igor Conić

Stakeholder Workshops (Faculty of Technical Sciences, Novi Sad, Serbia)

The data collected was applied in the testing and for improving the Future Danube Multi-hazard, Multi-risk Model (FDM), a catastrophe model implemented in the OASIS Loss Modeling Framework (Oasis-LMF). The FDM is implemented for the entire Danube Basin. High-resolution components for pluvial flood risks were further implemented to the city of Novi Sad, Serbia, after successful testing in the Budapest region. Observations and model results were used in a climate change impact assessment with the purpose of identifying adaptation options, appraisal of adaptation options and integration of an adaptation action plan into the Feasibility Study of the WWTP construction. The results of the pluvial flood model for Novi Sad clearly suggested that it is important to consider pluvial flood risks and that protective measures have to be considered as part of the WWTP construction, both under current and future climate conditions.

Pluvial flood modelling of Novi Sad

Moreover, novel estimates of drainage water intensities during heavy rains would advise the design of the simultaneously planned pumping station on the banks of the Danube. Combined, this clearly demonstrates the added value of the climate services and risk information delivered by the FDM also beyond the insurance sector, as well as its potential to support adaptation decision making with respect to infrastructural investments in Novi Sad.

You can download the case study here.

SERVICE OFFER

Demonstrating the Future Danube Model in a number of different contexts is now essential to increase confidence in the system by local authorities, businesses and the (Re)insurance sector. We are undertaking the development of a major multi‐hazard, multi‐risk catastrophe and future climate change model for the Danube River Basin.

The developed model suits not only to the highly demanding criteria required from major insurers and reinsurers, but also to innovate this sort of catastrophe model to be used within municipalities and industries likely to be widely affected by future climate change in the Hungarian part of the river system.

The unique qualities of our system are created by innovating stochastic modelling techniques that can model future risks such as Danube floods. It can also provide potential financial cost and damage results through use of the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework. Under this catastrophe model we are intending to bring the insurance sector, municipalities and utility company risk assessment needs together to co‐design this major model to assist the Danube Region with information for climate adaptation design and the correct underwriting of risk.

You can find our general offer here.

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