The Central Reinsurance Fund (CCR) estimated on Tuesday the cost of damage caused to buildings by drought in France in 2023 at 900 million euros, an amount lower than in 2022.
The bill is essentially linked to the phenomenon of shrinkage-swelling (RGA) of clays, due to ground movements caused by the alternation of periods of rain and drought, which weakens individual houses.
The amount of 900 million is the one considered the most probable by the public reinsurer’s experts, who cite a range between 750 million euros and 1 billion euros.
It remains lower than the record cost of the drought last year, the bill for which was revised upwards to 3.5 billion euros.
“Compared to normal, compared to the resources of the plan, compared to what a total of claims should be over a year, it is already important,” declared Edouard Vieillefond, general director of CCR since this summer, when a morning of discussions organized by the professional federation of the France Insurers sector.
The charge is also lower than the average cost expected by the CCR for this peril in the years to come, based on the IPCC scenarios and also revealed on Tuesday: a little below 1.5 billion euros per year.
The estimate from France Assureurs, the professional federation of the sector, is in the same vein. She made the addition for the period 2020-2050, to reach 43 billion euros, three times more than the previous thirty years.
This cost is linked to repairs to houses built on clay soils threatened with cracks due to the RGA phenomenon. It affects a good half of the metropolitan territory. More than half of French houses, or 10.4 million, are in areas of medium or high exposure to RGA.
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These significant amounts raise the question of the financial balance of the system dedicated to natural disasters, created in 1982 and financed mainly by a 12% surcharge on home insurance contracts, which represents on average 25 euros per year per household. .
The general director of France Assureurs Franck Le Vallois spoke out on Tuesday in favor of an increase to 18% of this additional premium.
At the forefront, the insurance sector announced on September 12 the launch of a full-scale test aimed at evaluating over five years the effectiveness of four types of solutions to combat soil deformation.
In total, 300 houses will be part of the experiment: 200 which have already suffered damage and 100 others where the solutions will be applied for prevention.