2021-12-21 CoMeta release

New Content

Themes

• Fungicides. Fungi cause more crop loss worldwide than any other pest. Systemic fungicides control fungal disease on crops by killing or inhibiting parasitic fungi such as rusts, blights, molds, and mildew. They are used both to prevent fungal disease when crops are first established and to increase yield later in the growth cycle. Fungicides are also used to prevent blemishes that reduce the value of a crop. Fungicide use is expected to increase due to climate change and the pace of scientific investigation of their impact on human health and the environment is accelerating. There is also concern that increased use of fungicides is leading to fungicide resistance in both agriculture and medicine.

Litagion agents

• Strobilurins. Azoxystrobin, kresoxim-methyl, pyraclostrobin, and trifloxystrobin are strobilurin fungicides widely used in agriculture to combat fungal diseases such as white mold, powdery mildew, downy mildew, cane and leaf spot, black rot, and rusts. Strobilurins were first isolated from a forest mushroom Strobilurus tenacellus that produces an antifungal substance to suppress other fungi. Synthetic strobilurins became commercially available in 1996 and are now used to control fungal diseases in a wide variety of crops including berries, grapes, cereals, tree nuts, vegetables, turfgrasses, and ornamental plants.

Industry Mapping

CoMeta and Oortfolio have always allowed users to describe individual policies in terms of NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes, SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes, or ISO-CGL class codes. Those industry codes are used to estimate ground-up losses for policies that do not correspond to a company available in Praedicat's company inventory. With this release, users can continue to describe policies in terms of SIC codes and ISO-CGL class codes, but those codes will be automatically mapped to NAICS codes employing a one-to-one mapping that is available to users in the portfolio upload template.

The reason for making this change is that Praedicat's liability catastrophe models rely upon NAICS alone to obtain external economic information, such as the distribution of revenue and employment within industries. The U.S. government stopped collecting economic information by SIC code in 1992 and the taxonomy has not been updated since 1987. ISO-CGL class codes, owned and maintained by the Insurance Services Office, were never designed to serve as a comprehensive industrial taxonomy and do not map directly to externally available economic data. Translating SIC codes and ISO-CGL class codes to NAICS codes at the time of portfolio ingestion via a transparent mapping allows policies to be joined directly to Praedicat's liability catastrophe event set specified in terms of its native industrial taxonomy.

This new, more direct approach to mapping policies described in terms of SIC codes or ISO-CGL class codes to Praedicat's liability catastrophe event set can result in some differences in estimated portfolio losses. Your account manager can help you understand which policies are most affected by the new approach to mapping industry-modeled policies to the event set.

Portfolio Upload

Users are encouraged to describe policies in terms of NAICS codes whenever possible in the portfolio upload template, but they may continue to describe policies in terms of SIC codes and ISO-CGL class codes as before. The SIC and ISO-CGL tabs in the portfolio upload template indicate how those codes are mapped to NAICS codes upon upload. If you wish to specify an alternative NAICS code for a given policy, you can do so by simply entering that NAICS code in the ind_code field on the Policy tab.  

Every policy that is described by a Praedicat BusinessID (company_code) is also, upon upload, now assigned a NAICS code for the purposes of reporting portfolio results by industry.  The NAICS code assigned to each BusinessID is provided in the Companies tab.  If you wish to specify an alternative NAICS code for a given BusinessID, you can do so by entering that NAICS code in the ind_code field on the Policy tab.

Industry Disaggregation

Now that every policy in a portfolio is assigned a NAICS code, both scenario and probabilistic loss output can be fully disaggregated by industry. Industry has been added to the set of "view by" options in CoMeta's Scenario Analysis feature so that you can now see how scenario losses break down by industry within a given portfolio (2). Probabilistic losses by industry are not available in Oortfolio, but will be once CoMeta's exposure management feature is complete in early 2022.  However, a new AssignedNAICSCode field is available in the Policies file contained within the probabilistic loss ELT output that records the NAICS code assigned to each policy so that users of the ELT data can now disaggregate probabilistic losses by industry.