New Caledonia riots (May 2024)

On May 13, 2024, while the National Assembly was debating the constitutional bill that would unfreeze the provincial electorate, greater Noumea went up in flames: roadblocks, looting, arson at shops, warehouses and plants, notably in the Ducos industrial zone. A state of emergency was decreed on May 15. France Assureurs put insured damage at about one billion euros, for a territory of about 270,000 people, an amount out of all proportion to the property premiums written locally. What many discovered then: riot falls outside the French natural catastrophe regime and gets no public reinsurance from the CCR. It sits under the riot and civil commotion cover of the policy, when that cover was bought, with its sublimits and deductibles, so the loss lands on insurers and their private reinsurers. Many shops had nothing, or a cover capped well below the value of the stock and the building. What followed was the usual sequence: several insurers stripped riot cover from their business policies, others stopped taking new clients, and some business owners could not find an insurer to reopen. The State stepped in with emergency support for businesses, short-time work schemes, grants to destroyed businesses and state-guaranteed reconstruction loans, without taking over the claims themselves, but the underlying question remains open for the underwriter: how to insure riot in a territory where it can return at every institutional deadline, with a portfolio concentrated in a single urban area?

• France Assureurs, estimate of insured losses from the New Caledonia riots, 2024