Jayanta Guin

Background

About Jayanta Guin

What does a 100-year hurricane in Florida look like? How about in South Carolina or in New York or both? These were difficult questions to answer 30 years ago, from a financial perspective. Now they are not, thanks to the existence of catastrophe risk models. At AIR, starting with our flagship U.S. hurricane model, we have steadily developed a suite of models over the last 30 years that cover various natural and man-made catastrophes in more than 100 countries to answer this type of question and many, many more. It has been gratifying to oversee the research for and the development of these market tools that have helped the insurance industry weigh important decisions on how they estimate, price and manage their catastrophe risk. While we started out by developing catastrophe models for mature insurance markets, where risks are better understood, we then worked to develop models for other cat-prone regions and emerging markets. There are still large gaps, however, between insured losses and insurable (what can be insured but is not) losses in developing regions, where awareness of the risk is lower and there are fewer resources to deal with risk. Bridging this “protection gap” with catastrophe models that help governments and institutions make objective decisions by quantifying risk is a very important part of our role and an ongoing challenge. Through various initiatives and partnerships, we are addressing this challenge. Other challenges we have taken on within the past few years include modeling U.S. inland flood probabilistically, modeling pandemics involving various pathogens at a global scale, and modeling emerging risks like supply chain disruptions and cyber-attacks to globally-connected systems. We also continue to try to understand climate variability as the world’s climate changes and how that impacts the future. At AIR we have always embraced challenges for the opportunities they present—to mitigate risk and to make communities more resilient.