Mapfre has renewed its collaboration agreement with the company Lobelia Earth, with which it completed an initial pilot in 2023, to carry out an internal climate-risk assessment for its entire operational portfolio, which includes 16 million customers around the world.

The goal is to deepen its understanding of the impact of these types of risks and evaluate how they can be applied to business, especially in a context marked by increasingly severe extreme-weather events and a widening protection gap for natural disasters. 

To achieve this, Lobelia Earth will use the Lobelia.Climate platform, which will analyze the exposure and vulnerability of insured homes, businesses, factories, and other properties to seven different climate hazards, including flooding, extreme winds, wildfires, droughts, and others, using high-resolution, high-accuracy climate data.  Unlike the global climate models currently available, this methodology calculates extreme events at a local scale, improving prediction accuracy through observational data and reducing uncertainty by using multiple physical models.

Internal learning

This second, one-year pilot will enable Mapfre to determine whether the Lobelia.Climate platform meets its needs for estimating the impact of climate change and, if so, share the insights with other companies within the Group so they can use it to better protect their customers, reduce claims, and strengthen relationships through expert, personalized support. 

In recent years, in addition to major catastrophes, the insurance and reinsurance sector has reported a significant rise in so-called “secondary risks”: climate-related events that are less intense but more frequent, such as wildfires, droughts, heat waves, storms, strong winds, flooding, snowfall, and others. These events are causing increasingly severe impacts in terms of human lives and economic losses, now accounting for more than half of all recorded losses, as well as extraordinary damage to infrastructure and ecosystems.