The Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Centre (GCACIC), a joint initiative of Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC, the leading global risk and reinsurance specialist, and the City University of Hong Kong, has published a new paper on tropical cyclone activity variations between 1965 and 2005 in the South China Sea region. The report identifies trends over the years and decades during this period, and the factors that drove these variations.

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A powerful earthquake hit a remote region in western China at 23:49 UTC on  April 13 (07:49 on  April 14 local time), destroying buildings, damaging infrastructure and killing at least 400 people. The earthquake, measuring 6.9 Mw, was located between China’s Qinghai Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region, some 28 miles (45 kilometers) northwest of Yushu and 235 miles (375 kilometers) south-southeast of Golmud, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS added that the quake had a shallow depth of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) and it was the strongest earthquake to hit the region since 1976. At least 18 aftershocks have hit the area since the main earthquake, the most powerful at 5.8 Mw.

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Asia Pacific buyers are generally not affected by the same degree of falling original demand that has been experienced in Europe and North America. But reinsurance price competition is still strong and buyers with a clean record were able to secure reductions. Overall the price picture was mixed, because against the background of a market that is softening, there was significant loss activity in several territories during 2009, particularly in the Philippines and Indonesia. Buyers who received reinsurance recoveries in 2009 faced increases at renewal. In Australia an early renewal saw clients achieving risk adjusted rate reductions of up to 10 percent.

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