In a proactive response to consecutive years of record wildfire insured losses, Guy Carpenter has been working to develop tools to help clients quantify, manage and better understand their wildfire risk, according to Alexander Van Dijk, President, U.S. Branches, and Kimberly Roberts, North America Peril Advisory, Guy Carpenter. This includes a holistic suite of tools and services based on current developments in wildfire science – the GC Wildfire Diagnostic (SM). Guy Carpenter has created this solution suite by building on our deep understanding of the wildfire hazard and resiliency.
It has been built thorough validation, verification and testing of wildfire catastrophe models, including the ability to modify results to account for scenario-based issues such as climate change and mitigation measures, and through our leading position at the forefront of risk quantification and analysis. At the core of the new GC Wildfire Diagnostic are the GC Wildfire Risk Score and GC Urban Conflagration Index. In 2020, the existing analytical suite was enhanced with these tools facilitating risk quantification and comparisons across and within states, counties and individual communities.
The GC Wildfire Risk Score assesses risk on a site-by-site basis, capturing climate, meteorological and landscape data across multiple spatial scales summarized in a simple, single metric. Covering the lower 48 states at a 30-meter resolution, the Wildfire Risk Score was carefully calibrated and validated by Guy Carpenter scientists to ensure that risk classes are appropriately differentiated and provide superior performance when validated against observed events.
GC Wildfire Risk Score. In this example, risk scores would be highest in the purple and red areas and lower in the yellow and green areas.