Economic losses from September floods in Asia more than $7.5 billion: Aon

Seasonal monsoon rains leading to major flooding in Asia this September caused about $7.5 billion in economic losses, reinsurance company Aon Benfield noted in its monthly Global Catastrophe Recap report.

Much of that loss was in China, where flooding caused nearly $5 billion in damage across six provinces, the report said. About 407,000 homes in Pakistan were destroyed from flooding, along with 1.1 million acres of crops, the report also noted. Seasonal monsoon flooding also occurred in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, Aon said.

Severe weather throughout the United States also caused more than $125 million in insured losses in September, Aon said, Wind and hail storms in the central and eastern part of the country caused economic losses of about $225 million, according to the report.

“Over the past few years and again in 2012, we have seen flooding emerge as one of the costliest perils across the globe from an economic perspective,” Steve Jakubowski, president of Impact Forecasting, the arm of Aon that publishes the monthly report, noted in a release.

“It is a hazard that our catastrophe modelling teams are increasingly addressing, and one that we will continue to focus heavily on going forward,” he went on to say. “As insurance and reinsurance penetration continues to increase across Asia, we expect that flood exposures will become a key challenge for the industry, and so we are obtaining the very best data and developing appropriate modeling technology to ensure that the insurers can assuredly offer a range of products to mitigate flood risk across multiple regions.”