Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction to host workshop on IBC’s new flood maps

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) announced on Wednesday that its next Friday Forum series will focus on the Insurance Bureau of Canada’s (IBC) new flood maps.

The workshop will be held from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 26 in the ICLR’s boardroom at 20 Richmond Street East, Suite 210, in Toronto. Participants are welcome to attend in person or join by webinar.

The workshop, titled IBC’s new flood maps: Leveraging data to effectively assess and manage flood risk, will review the newly developed flood models and present key findings from the data in terms of exposure hotspots across Canada, said information from ICLR. The session will also explore best practices for using the data and applying the flood models, as well as other key risk data, in pricing.

With the increase in the frequency and severity of flooding and extreme weather events, there is a greater need to provide Canadian homeowners with adequate protection against flooding and effective flood insurance, the ICLR information said. To this end, LexisNexis Risk Solutions has been working with the IBC to develop and manage its flood risk program for Canada.

A key component of the initiative is the creation of all new pluvial and fluvial flood maps for Canada. These new models, produced by LexisNexis partner, JBA Risk Management, fully leverage local river, rainfall, snowmelt and higher resolution Digital Terrain Model datasets, “resulting in completely updated river flow and rainfall estimates based upon a much more detailed hydrological study where snowmelt is now explicitly modelled,” ICLR said.

“The resulting maps represent the most comprehensive and detailed set of Canadian flood maps, reflecting the uniqueness of the local environment and greatly improving risk assessment outcomes,” the information said. “Using LexisNexis technology, IBC will be able to quantify Canada’s flood risk and clearly identify the number of properties at risk of flooding and the associated economic losses for virtually any geography in Canada.”

Related: Insurance Bureau of Canada, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and other partners contribute to national flood program

LexisNexis is also working with Canadian insurers, as well as United Kingdom, Irish and European insurance customers, to help them gain better insight into their flood exposure and increase visibility into their overall property underwriting.

The ICLR session will be introduced by a staff member from the IBC, and will feature three speakers presently remotely from overseas. The first speaker is Simon de la Hoyde, head of sales for insurance for the U.K., Ireland and Canada at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. De la Hoyde, who has been with LexisNexis for seven years, has over 20 years of experience in the geographic information systems (GIS) space and delivering enterprise data visualization and analytics solutions. Prior to LexisNexis, de la Hoyde worked for MapInfo (now Pitney Bowes) for over 10 years.

Another speaker is Richard Toomey, who is responsible for GIS analytics for insurance for the U.K., Ireland and Canada at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Toomey has extensive experience in the areas of geospatial data analytics, location intelligence and mapping and has worked with many of the world’s leading insurers, the information said. Toomey has worked for LexisNexis and Mapflow, which was acquired by LexisNexis in 2013, for 16 years.

The third speaker is Simon Waller, managing director of JBA Risk Management, who has over 25 years of experience in the water and river engineering sector.

RSVP: Tracy Waddington 

Webinar: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1838339833023362049