French interministerial nat cat commission
The body that reviews, town by town, requests for recognition of a natural disaster and gives ministers the opinion on which the order, and therefore the CatNat cover, rests.
The interministerial nat cat commission is the body that reviews, town by town, requests for recognition of a natural disaster and gives its opinion to the ministers who sign the order. It brings together representatives of the ministries that sign the orders: the Interior, the Economy and the Budget, plus Overseas France for overseas territories. Its secretariat is run by the natural disasters unit of the civil protection directorate (DGSCGC) at the Interior Ministry. For a long time it rested on nothing more than an administrative circular. The law of December 28, 2021 gave it a statutory basis and required its decisions to state reasons. The process starts with the mayor, who files the request with the prefecture, now within twenty-four months of the event. The prefecture gathers the technical reports: Météo-France for rain and wind, BRGM (the French geological survey) for ground movement. The commission then tests those readings against written criteria, a rainfall return period for floods, a soil moisture index for clay shrinkage. The statute speaks of the abnormal intensity of a natural agent. The commission turns that notion into thresholds, and that is where rejections are decided. A town next door to one that was recognized can get a negative opinion because the weather grid cell covering it stayed just under the threshold. For the insurer the opinion decides everything: no order, no CatNat cover, and the claim falls back on the ordinary sections of the policy, when one of them applies. Drought accounts for most of the disputes, because damage shows up months later and the criterion is computed by season.
Textbook case, made-up figures: a storm drops 62 millimeters in three hours on a town. For that duration and location, the 1-in-10-year threshold is 58 millimeters, so the town is recognized. Its neighbor, covered by a different grid cell, got only 51 millimeters on the reading used, even though its cellars flooded just as badly. Negative opinion. Its forty claims are settled outside the scheme, under water damage cover for some policies and not at all for the rest.
CatNat commission, interministerial natural disaster commission, French nat cat recognition committee
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