What’s New: In Brief (December 16, 2008)

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) and The Co-operators are poised to unveil on Dec. 17 the third “safer living home” to be built in Canada.
The house, which replaces a home that was previously destroyed by fire, has been built in Fort Erie (Ridgeway), Ontario.
The new home is built to “better-than-building-code” standards under the ICLR’s ‘Designed…for safer living’ program.
The program is a first-of-its-kind partnership seeking to raise awareness of the need for safer living standards in an era of climate change.
Like the first, prototype home built in West Point, Prince Edward Island, the house in Fort Erie is specially engineered to withstand high winds, rain and severe winter weather.

Munich Re is cooperating with risk modelling firm RMS to extend its risk research and quantification capabilities.
Munich Re has announced it will embark with RMS on “research in new and also in emerging areas of risk modeling and, by that, expand the frontiers of risk [models] and insurability.”
With this initiative, Munich Re and RMS will collaborate to identify and pursue shared research priorities for new and emerging sources of risk yet to be modelled.
They will also work together on existing areas of risk such as hurricanes and earthquakes, which continue to present challenges in modelling and its applications.