"A €14m lottery jackpot win has resulted in a payout from the collateralised reinsurance based ILS transaction, according to sponsor the Lottoland Group, a fast-growing Gibraltar licensed online lottery provider."

"Three Argentinian enterprises have joined forces to develop climate index futures to help agricultural producers to better protect themselves against the impacts of severe or inclement weather, with drought the first targeted product launch."

"The increased severity and frequency of extreme weather and climate-related disasters presents a grave threat to the important agricultural sectors of emerging economies, a trend that is likely to continue without adequate risk transfer solutions and improved disaster resilience efforts."

"The UK’s Bank of England has been asked to review the potential for risks to arise from insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bonds and alternative reinsurance capital, as these practices can “create connections between insurance risks and other financial intermediaries.”"

"Renewable energy focused underwriting specialists, GCube Underwriting Ltd. (GCube), has launched a new weather risk transfer product for the wind and hydroelectric energy sectors, an area that increasingly reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) players seek to tap into."

"Once again the discussion of exchange-traded weather risk management products for Indian farms, companies and insurers has come to the fore, but this time the plan is for a product to be launched after September of this year."

"The real money, peer-to-peer prediction market PredictIt is up and running in the United States. Modeled after the pioneering Iowa Electronic Markets, it offers a platform for the trading of futures contracts with binary payoffs contingent on the realization of specified events."

"AXA’s specialist digital insurance and banking seed fund, AXA Seed Factory, has partnered with AXA Corporate Solutions and French climate and weather services firm Climpact-Metnext, to launch ClimateSecure, an insurance and weather-risk management platform."

"One of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, Swiss Re, recently announced that two million African smallholder farmers are now protected against drought, floods and other natural perils, thanks to the efforts of the World Bank and Swiss Re Corporate Solutions."

Though PredictIt could easily be confused with online gambling, it is legal — a prediction or futures market for politics that uses the marketplace to forecast events. PredictIt, a nonprofit research project, partnered with a university and restricted wagering on any single question to 5,000 people with each individual investment capped at $850.

A market for political predictions is set for launch after a federal regulator gave the go ahead, allowing would-be pundits to put their money where their mouth is.

The advent of green bonds could finally make green indexes big, liquid and desirable. As the first 'fully green' structured product is launched, there is hope that support from governments and investors will help the sector grow

Reinsurance firm Swiss Re has assisted with the development and launch of the first weather derivative backed microinsurance scheme which aims to protect smallholder farmers in Nigeria from the risk of adverse weather patterns.

To find cures for cancer, investors must fund about 150 projects in order to lower the standard deviation of possible returns from cancer cure projects. With such a high number of viable projects, it becomes possible to issue debt. Once it is possible to issue debt, securitization concepts may be layered on top of portfolio theory to find viable cancer cures. As with traditional securitization, various tranches would be created for different risk appetites and with different guarantees for creditors buying those differently segmented risky tranches.

Concerned that the lack of terrorism coverage would hit the American economy, the US Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) into law in November 2002. Since its inception, TRIA has been reauthorized twice in the form of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Extension Act (TRIEA) in 2005 and Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (TRIPRA) in 2007. During this time, the Act has required the private risk market to assume a larger share of the program by increasing deductible and co-share requirements. The private market’s ability and willingness to cover terrorism risks has therefore increased since 2002 because of the federal program.

Reinsurance giant Swiss Re has teamed up with Chinese firm China Pacific Insurance (CPI), to introduce a temperature-index insurance scheme to protect the $73 million hairy crab industry.

Public-private financing solutions, such as natural catastrophe insurance pools, micro insurance, and alternative risk transfer solutions such as catastrophe bonds, have the potential to enlarge the financial capacity of insurance solutions, by providing affordable cover to a wider pool. With the expertise and capital support from international and regional organisations, the public and private sectors can work together in developing purposeful risk transfer solutions for the region

Reinsurance giant Munich Re have teamed up with Germany’s Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbelt (GIZ) GmbH to establish a risk transfer system for agriculture in Peru. The project titled; “Integrated Financial Management of Climate Risks in Peru’s Agricultural Sector” will aim to work alongside Peruvian authorities to develop a legal, institutional and structural framework to protect the agriculture business from weather-related risks.

The search for yield has taken investors into the nether regions of the solar system.

Here we review recent GC Capital Idea stories on space risk and related insurance solutions.

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said that while it anticipates some alternative reinsurance capital being allocated to terrorism risk reinsurance in the future, it expects the role of ILS and alternative capital in terrorism reinsurance to remain a minor one.

IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, has signed two grant agreements totaling $3.9m, with the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture to expand a weather index insurance pilot to over one million East African farmers.

Much of the new, or alternative, capital, which has flowed into the reinsurance market in recent years, will prove permanent in the face of major catastrophe losses, according to the world’s largest asset management firm Blackrock.

The market in exchange traded snowfall derivatives has all but ground to a halt, according to a report from CNN, resulting in not even a single snowfall-linked weather derivative contract being traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in 2013.

Super Typhoon Haiyan might well have been the biggest and strongest storm in recorded history, with wind speeds exceeding 200mph and hurricane-force winds extending more than 50 miles from the storm’s eye. Moody’s estimates that half of the Philippines’ sugar cane crop has been destroyed, along with a third of its rice-growing fields. Most devastatingly, thousands of people were killed by the storm. In other words, Haiyan is the very model of a modern environmental catastrophe.

Kalista Global the Bermuda headquartered insurance and reinsurance services firm focusing on the insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bond, parametric re/insurance and alternative reinsurance sectors, has launched another new product today. Hot on the heels of the launch of an index-based ENSO (El Nino) cover the firm has announced the launch of a range of multi-peril crop industry loss warranty (ILW) products.

A cross party group of members of the U.S. Congress have introduced a piece of legislation aimed at achieving the renewal of the U.S. government’s terrorism insurance backstop until the end of 2019. The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act is slated to expire at the end of 2014 and there is now a sense of urgency to get the renewal and extension of TRIA in place by the end of this year as the majority of terror insurance contracts have one year terms.

Governments should seek to avoid becoming the insurers of last resort when disaster strikes by choosing to buy protection through ex-ante risk financing mechanisms offered by the insurance and reinsurance markets. Despite a trend towards more catastrophe insurance coverage, the increasing uptake is not keeping pace with the growing amount of uninsured losses and this gap looks set to widen as the developing nations of Africa and Asia modernise and economic loss exposures grow.

Earlier this week we wrote that the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), the catastrophe risk pooling facility who provide parametric based disaster insurance cover to Caribbean countries, had finalised their renewals for the 2012-2013 policy year. All 16 of their member countries renewed their hurricane and earthquake cover and now the CCRIF are actively negotiating and discussing their soon to launch excess rainfall cover with their members.

Hedge funds are showing increased interest in the reinsurance sector as they look for ways to diversify their investment strategies and to deploy their accumulated capital, according to a briefing paper published by ratings agency A.M. Best. The extent of the catastrophic losses experienced during 2011 has served to heighten this interest as hedge fund entrants to the reinsurance sector look to replace capital lost due to the catastrophes of 2011.