Hubert Bast

Background

About Hubert Bast

Extreme weather and climate events are impacting human society and will be even more in the near future. Re/insurers, governments, development/banks, pension funds, asset management companies, utility companies, etc. all have the need to better understand their exposure to various physical risks at the asset level. I have over 18 years of professional experience in building and assessing natural hazard risk quantification tools and in communicating their findings and results to stakeholders and clients. I'm currently a Technical Director at JBA Risk Management with a focus on parametric flood insurance solutions for disaster risk financing programmes working with specialist development insurers and reinsurers. Between 2020 & 2022 I was leading the Catastrophe Modelling division at Mitiga Solutions, an InsurTech startup providing natural hazard risk assessments to the insurance and aviation industry as well as to humanitarian organisations for disaster relief. I was part of the team behind the first humanitarian-sponsored catastrophe bond covering pure volcanic eruption risk featuring a parametric trigger based on ash plume height. Prior to that, I led the catastrophe model development team of Willis Re where my team and I were building models where none existed so far. Embedded in the reinsurance broker’s international arm, i.e. all territories outside of North America, I obtained an excellent understanding of various regional reinsurance markets and their respective natural hazard exposures. My passion for climate warming related research and a better understanding of the processes and impacts of associated events was ignited during my studies in Environmental Sciences. My thesis assessed the risk of a potential reintroduction of Malaria to Northern Germany due to climate warming, using GIS modelling techniques. Moving to the UK for my first job, I joined HR Wallingford, a hydraulic engineering and research company. During the six years that followed, I had the opportunity to be involved in and lead a variety of national and international flood risk consultancy projects.