Hurricane insurance is expensive, and so Caricom, the grouping of Caribbean nations, has collective insurance for the islands as one of its highest priorities.
But there’s another problem with hurricane insurance: calculating losses can take months, and money for rebuilding often doesn’t arrive until the year after the hurricane hits. But emergency funds are most desperately needed in the weeks and months immediately after the disaster.
Parametric
Hence the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF). It’s parametric, which means that the payout is linked not to damages but simply to a list of parameters, chief among them wind speed. If weather conditions in any of the insured countries qualify, the facility pays out in less than two weeks, an astonishingly short time compared with the waits of up to a year that are not uncommon in the world of Caribbean hurricane insurance payouts.
The CCRIF itself has enough reserves to cover the first $10 million in damages. After that, $90 million in hurricane risk is ceded to reinsurance companies. And, in a novel development, another $20 million in risk was ceded by means of a catastrophe swap orchestrated by the World Bank.