The AAIS Pulse newsmagazine recently featured Robert Hartwig, Ph.D., CPCU, industry expert and insurance professor at University of South Carolina's Moore School of Business. He spoke with AAIS CEO Ed Kelly on a range of topics facing the industry including COVID-19, climate change, cyber risk, year-end financials, and much more.

In this edition of CEO Angles, AAIS President and CEO Ed Kelly speaks with Keith Wolfe, President of US Property & Casualty at Swiss Re and an AAIS board member, about lessons learned during the pandemic, the increasing value of data, the need to start looking at climate change, the troubling cyber risk trend, and the hot topic of social inflation.

Flood insurance has long been primarily administered by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which has 5.1 million policies in force. But the landscape for flood insurance – and who needs it – is changing. This was the topic of an AM Best webinar that included Linda Jancik, AAIS Personal Lines Product Manager, Serena Garrahan, Vice President, Inland Flood Product Manager at Munich Re US, and Rob Olson, Senior Research Analyst at International Risk Management Institute (IRMI).

Climate change continues to wreak havoc on farm and agriculture businesses. With increasingly unpredictable weather, destructive storms, and a decrease in natural resources, the farm & ag industry is scrambling to find a more reliable way to farm– one that would protect the industry from a quickly changing world.

From record heat waves to the coldest of winters, hurricanes, droughts and flooding, it’s no secret that our climate and weather are changing…and changing the agribusiness insurance landscape with it.

In 2018, the California Camp Fire wildfire resulted in more than $16 billion in loss. Flooding in the Midwest resulted in crop contamination from nearby livestock fields. And the crippling cold from two polar vortexes in the last five years caused frozen pipes and burst boilers, leading to property and equipment damage claims.