Implementation of Blockchain Technology in Insurance Contracts against Natural Hazards: A Methodological Multi-Disciplinary Approach

Abstract

Risk insurance for disasters plays a relevant part in the implementation of risk reduction strategies during the pre-disaster phase. This is essential to support risk management towards decreasing the marginal risk allowing policy holders to transfer risk to avoid considerable financial loads from the costs incurred during the recovery phase in a post-disaster phase. There is evidence that the introduction of an integrated risk insurance strategy for community resilience planning is still lacking. Thus, this undermines the possibility to have proper optimized holistic risk management; on the one hand this strengthens pre-disaster risk mitigation measures, mostly relying on mitigative infrastructural solutions, and on the other hand it better defines risk prevention strategies mostly connected to land planning and urban development. This paper will show how insurance markets can play a key role towards mitigating the economic consequences of natural and climate change disasters, and how essential it is to better quantify the beneficial effects and costs of engineer-based mitigative solutions. In this context, the legal framework into which the actuarial quantitative model can be implemented will support the creation of an integrated multidisciplinary approach with potential implementation on a novel platform capable of collecting and processing information from different sources and dimensions such as blockchain technology. The scientific community is, in fact, increasingly interested in implementing blockchain technology to overcome problems linked to the contractual dimension of natural disaster risk insurance which can be interpreted as a sort of smart contracting. Through a study that involved four distinct areas, namely: Law, environmental engineering, insurance and IT, this paper proposes a specific multidisciplinary methodology to achieve the drafting and implementation of a digital insurance contract on a blockchain platform against natural hazards. This paper proposes the basis to advance a quantitative concept to optimize the impact of catastrophe risk insurance onto the community resilience; in fact providing a key synergy for definition of pre-disaster conditions.