RMS, United Nations join to make cat modeling available to smaller nations

Catastrophe modeling firm Risk Management Solutions Inc. on Wednesday announced a public-private partnership with the United Nations that will enable government officials around the world free access to catastrophe models.

The deal, struck with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the World Bank, will grant government officials from both developed and developing nations access to UNISDR's new global multiperil probabilistic risk model, RMS(one), the modeler's cloud-based exposure and risk management platform.

“Availability of our model on RMS(one) will greatly increase its relevance towards achieving the broader objective of risk-sensitive public- and private-sector investment, in particular in low- and lower-middle-income countries and regions where commercial catastrophe models are not currently available,” Andrew Maskrey, coordinator of the UNISDR's Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, said in a statement.

Paul VanderMarck, chief products officer for RMS, said wider availability of catastrophe models will help support disaster risk reduction work in the public sector.

“RMS is leveraging the scalability of the RMS(one) platform and the RMS Cloud to enable governments to benefit from many of the same catastrophe risk modeling capabilities used widely by the insurance industry to quantify and manage catastrophe risk,” he said.