Q&A: Iceye on the need for proactive responses to flood events

1. As the UK’s weather profile evolves, how has the uptick in storms and flooding impacted claims strategies?

Claims strategies are increasingly coming under scrutiny. While UK insurers have not faced flood events on the scale of those in 2007 or during Storm Desmond in 2015/16 in recent years, the industry must be prepared for loss events of similar magnitude.

However, the rising number of climate-driven events is only part of the picture. To fully address emerging flood risks, insurers must understand the broader shifts in exposure – particularly those driven by urbanisation, or the frequency and severity of events.

Key factors include rising property values and rebuild costs, continued development on flood plains, as well as maintenance issues relating to flood defences, changes to agricultural land usage and the growing trend of paving over gardens.

As a result, much of today’s flooding stems not from rivers breaching their banks, but from surface water runoff.

2. What initial steps do insurers need to take if they want to create a more proactive response to flood events, rather than just reacting to an incident?

Having the ability to rapidly establish the complete flood extent and accurately identify areas most severely affected is critical. This allows for rapid deployment of ground resources and supports proactive communication with impacted policyholders, reassuring them that support is on the way.

Using this information to collaborate more effectively with loss adjusters is also critical to managing potential bottlenecks. This approach can allow specific loss adjusters to focus on hard-hit areas, rather than multiple adjusters visiting different properties on the same region – a common inefficiency.

Additional proactive measures include deploying contractors in advance to reduce delays in urgent tasks, such as drying out buildings or removing water-damaged carpets. Arranging long-term accommodation earlier, when needed, can also help avoid reliance on expensive hotels.

3. What data points do insurers need to have to underpin and inform a proactive claims strategy for flood events?

Insurers need to bridge the gap between anticipating a flood event and understanding its actual impact as it is occurring. The industry requires the capability to rapidly access accurate information on the location and severity of floodwaters and understand how that correlates with the location of their policyholders.

Additional data, such as affected property values and coverage, must also be quickly incorporated into the response.

A further challenge is the UK’s varied topography, which means flooding is often less predictable and more dispersed than in some other countries.

Rather than being slow-moving and concentrated in a single area, UK floods frequently impact multiple locations many miles apart simultaneously, as was seen in Storm Babet. This makes accurate mapping more complex and highlights the need for a more sophisticated, data-driven approach.

4. How can insurers use real-time data successfully to improve their speed and efficiency when responding to a flood event and potential surge in claims?

As the UK flood challenge evolves, satellite technology is playing an increasingly important role in helping insurers keep pace, delivering ever more sophisticated data and insights. It is likely that within the next decade, most insurers will rely on satellite-based solutions to support flood response.

Iceye’s Flood Rapid Impact Solution, for example, provides flood extent analysis within six hours of an event starting, updated every six hours to maintain near real-time accuracy. This is a new level of actionable flood intelligence, supporting more informed and immediate decision-making.

Such data enables faster, accurate loss estimation, quicker policyholder communication, earlier claims insight, and more efficient staff and resource deployment to the hardest-hit areas – critical in an era of rapid environmental change.