Gallagher Research Centre

Natural catastrophes pose a major risk to property (re)insurers globally, with insured losses from natural hazard estimated at $123 billion in 2023 alone. The Gallagher Research Centre has ongoing partnerships with world-leading academics across different perils and different regions, including global earthquake, global tropical cyclone, UK storm surge, Japan tsunami, US severe convective storm, European windstorm, and more.

One key initiative is the industry-first Global Tropical Cyclone Research Consortium, aiming to address major challenges within (re)insurance and beyond. It brings together academic and industry experts to study significant trends in tropical cyclone activity.

Colorado State University, the first academic entity to join the consortium, will focus on rapid intensification and the impacts of recurring climate patterns such as El Niño on TC activity, as well as what climate change might mean for future events.

As the (re)insurance market continues to evolve with increasingly complex dynamics, Casualty, Professional & Financial Lines carriers must be able to understand and manage new risks as they emerge. The Gallagher Research Centre has ongoing partnerships with policy and legal experts on significant topics for Casualty, Professional & Financial Lines.

One major area of focus is the rise in global climate litigation cases in recent years. Potential liability faced by companies, particularly to their Directors and Officers, as a result of this litigation has become an increasing concern for (re)insurers.

The Gallagher Research Centre is collaborating with the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Environment to develop multi-jurisdictional climate litigation scenarios for different industry sectors and company profiles to help clients understand this evolving risk landscape.

Life, Accident & Health carriers face a unique set of long-tail risks, feeling the long-term impacts of volatile global economies more acutely than many of their counterparts. The (re)insurance impacts of macroeconomic trends can be systemic and extensive, with impacts ranging from mass lapse risk in life insurance policies to reduced returns from properties and other investments.

The Gallagher Research Centre partnered with London School of Economics expert Professor Ricardo Reis to understand the drivers and future trends of macroeconomic activity across the global (re)insurance industry, with topics including inflation, interest rates, bond yields, recessionary trends, and commercial real estate returns.

Professor Reis utilised the latest economic and financial market data, along with research methods developed at the Centre for Macroeconomics, to produce regular market reports and articles for Gallagher Re.

Specialty carriers are exposed to a number of significant and volatile risks, with complex markets and increasingly challenging global conditions requiring a deep knowledge of evolving hazards. The Gallagher Research Centre has ongoing collaborations on a number of topics affecting Specialty lines, including Marine and Energy and Political Violence, Terrorism and War.

One major challenge for the Marine and Energy sector is understanding critical maritime and port trade flows from a (re)insurance perspective, with impacts of global supply chain disruptions being brought into focus following the COVID-19 pandemic and recent geopolitical conflicts.

The Gallagher Research Centre is collaborating with the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute to develop a new global port supply chain framework and database, which will enable improved analysis of potential widespread disruptions at various maritime chokepoints and quantification of their impacts.