—Steven Stichter, Kinetic Analysis Corporation
The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility [CCRIF], the world's first regional risk insurance facility, was established to provide member governments throughout the Caribbean with an economic buffer against impacts from the many natural hazards which frequent the region. CCRIF's parametric insurance mechanism provides cover for catastrophic hurricane and earthquake events. Kinetic Analysis Corporation [KAC] was contracted by CCRIF to perform the natural hazard and loss modeling that underlies the insurance scheme. A key component of this project consisted in building a distributed GIS data base on economic assets in each of the 19 member countries for use with KAC's detailed, site-specific hazard analysis. CCRIF will use the results of this analysis to price insurance contracts and calculate payout from historical and active events. KAC also provides CCRIF with realtime hazard and impact estimates from live storms affecting the Caribbean, with outputs available in KML or Esri shapefile formats.