Assessing present and future risk of water damage using building attributes, meteorology and topography

Abstract

Weather-related risk makes the insurance industry inevitably concerned with climate and climate change. Buildings hit by pluvial flooding is a key manifestation of this risk, giving rise to compensations of the induced physical damages and business interruptions.In this work, we establish a nationwide, building-specific risk score for water damage associated with pluvial flooding in Norway. We fit a generalized additive model that relates the number of water damages to a wide range of explanatory variables that can be categorized into building attributes, climatological variables and topographical characteristics.The model assigns a risk score to every location in Norway, based on local topography and