The immediate risks extreme weather poses to your business

Record date: 8/8/25
Air date: 8/27/25 

In the first episode of the Extreme Weather miniseries on Future of Risk by Zurich North America, Arooran Sivasubramaniam, Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions, and Pete Caminiti, Chief Underwriting Officer, Zurich North America, explore how businesses can navigate the growing threat of extreme weather events. While advancements in engineering and building codes have improved defenses against known hazards like hurricanes, shifting climate patterns are introducing new vulnerabilities.

Upcoming episode in the miniseries:

9/10/25: How extreme weather impacts construction

9/24/25: Top things C-suite leaders need to know now about extreme weather

10/8/25: Resilient: How extreme weather is affecting cities 

Guest:

Peter Caminiti
Chief Underwriting Officer
Zurich North America
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Peter Caminiti is Chief Underwriting Officer for Zurich North America, responsible for leading the company’s Technical Underwriting team, including Pricing, Product Management, Sustainability Underwriting, Underwriting University, Lines of Business Underwriting and Underwriting Services. He is a member of the Zurich North America Executive Committee, the Zurich North America Leadership Team and the Zurich Group Leadership Team.

Host:

Arooran Sivasubramaniam
Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions
Zurich North America
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As Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions for North America, Arooran Sivasubramaniam is responsible for the direction, growth and management of business resilience services to establish ZRS NA as a leader and trusted partner in the evolving risk prevention space.

(PLEASE NOTE: This is an edited podcast transcript, capturing speakers with natural speech patterns that may include incomplete sentences and/or asides, grammatical errors, verbal shorthand and some statements that may be less clear in print.)

Episode transcript:

Arooran Sivasubramaniam: Last year marked the 14th consecutive year the United States experienced 10 or more billion dollar disasters.¹‚² We are here to explore this today.

Welcome to Future of Risk presented by Zurich North America. We explore the changing risk and resilience landscape and share insights on the challenges that face businesses to help you meet tomorrow prepared.

We're kicking off our extreme weather podcast miniseries by focusing on the immediate risks that businesses face. I'm Arooran Sivasubramaniam, Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions, North America, and today I'm speaking with Pete Caminiti, Chief Underwriting Officer at Zurich North America. Pete, welcome to the podcast.

Pete Caminiti: Thank you Aroo. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Defining extreme weather: How extreme weather is changing

Sivasubramaniam: Pete, let's jump into it and maybe clarify some myths, if you will. So, basic question, when we say extreme weather, what does that mean to you?

Caminiti: Yes, I think in the context of the conversation we're having today, when I think about extreme weather, I think about it from a couple of different angles. I don't think it has — it's not a defined term. But I think about it in two different ways: I think about weather events that are known weather events that are getting stronger and more severe.

So, I think about if you look at the hurricane activity over the last several years, I think one of the observations that many of us have is that storms intensify much quicker. They get much larger, in a much shorter period of time than they had in the past. When I think about extreme, that's the extreme that I'm thinking about for a known peril or a known condition like hurricanes during hurricane season.

The other side of extreme is weather events that were not common, not frequent in certain types of geographies, and now we see those manifesting in a more material way. So, I think about things like the Texas winter storm that we experienced a few years back. Winter storm activity that's happened in the northeast recently, that northeast has used to winter storm activity, but has had some impact.

You think about wildfire, and we all think about wildfire in California, but wildfire exists and occurs in other states, right? And we're starting to see that have a more significant impact in areas outside of where you would be accustomed to having some of those really significant impacts.

So, extreme for me, again, just to recap, it's the known events like a hurricane, but just becoming much larger, developing much quicker than we've experienced in the past. And then it's those geographies that are being exposed to weather events that maybe were less common in the past.

Are weather events more common or just better documented?

Sivasubramaniam: That's a good summary and a nice way of thinking about it. Thinking about it, do you think we're actually seeing more events? Are they more extreme?

Caminiti: So, it's interesting. It depends on the different perils that you're talking about and some of it is difficult to answer because the scientific data is not there. We have a really good record for certain types of activities and some of the historical record for other types of activities; we just didn't have the same level of observation.

So, one of the things that you'll often hear in just regular media reporting is the frequency of tornado activity. Tornadoes are happening much more common than they were in the past. And that's a little bit of a question mark from a historical record standpoint, because we didn't keep records once upon a time. So, that tornado that may have passed through that geography where nobody lived, nobody worked, went unreported, went undetected before we had radar.

Today, we have people living in areas that they weren't living before. We've had the “urban sprawl,” so we're getting more record of some of these events. So, some of that may be a false signal of increased frequency. But there's other perils for sure where you can be absolutely certain that we are having greater frequency of some of these extreme weather events, and they're occurring in places that they hadn't before.

So, we've seen a shifting of things like the tornado alley [and] the hail belt. Those things have been drifting. The geographic map is being changed on where we think these things happen on a regular basis.

From freeze to flood: Building resilience in the face of unexpected, overlapping perils

Sivasubramaniam: That's a fair point. Maybe combine the last two topics a little bit. Certain perils and certain types of events are happening more and more, but also you see several events happening currently or coming together. That's really causing like a lollapalooza almost, like a very far more significant event. So, one plus one in extreme weather does not equal two. It's often 10 or more, right?

So, you mentioned the Dallas freeze a few years ago, and what we saw was several things coming together at once. And the three things that jumped to my mind—and I know you have a lot of experience in this side is.

We had colder weather than expected. That's one thing. And then, it lasted longer than we expected, so that's the second part. And on top of that, buildings were less occupied than usual. So, we didn't have people there to remedy the situation on time either, right? So, it just ballooned. How do you think that kind of plays out? What you see?

Caminiti: I'll take it back to my definition of extreme weather. When I think about those two categories, this topic that you're raising, it's interesting when I talk about hurricanes getting larger, faster than in the past, this becomes a matter of we have figured out by and large through building codes and engineering how to become really resilient for some of those known perils.

So, if I take a hurricane, the chances of a building surviving in Florida today then 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, is much higher. The challenge with the extreme weather is the bar continues to raise. And so, the standard that we've adopted to make that building resilient five years ago may not be sufficient five years from now, but it's an engineering problem that we can solve.

The other weather, the other type of extreme weather, the weather that's occurring someplace that is less common or it's a fairly new kind of development. The Texas freeze being a good example. Now they've happened in the past, but not in a long time. And this one, I think what these types of weather events do is they expose the vulnerabilities. You and I can only get so creative in thinking through what all of the different potential vulnerabilities are. When the event happens, there's one we didn't think about, or two we didn't think about.

And so, when we see the Texas freeze, it's a culmination of a lot of different things that happened and it exposed multiple vulnerabilities. It would've been probably a little difficult or a little farfetched to imagine some of these things that we then experienced, and we can learn from those.

So, as you mentioned in the winter freeze, it was colder than expected. It happened longer than expected. It happened during a period of time where buildings were less occupied. It also happened during a period of time where in what's different than the last time we had significant freeze activity, like this is much greater reliance on renewable energy.

Texas is a very large wind state, and their wind turbines are a very important part of their energy production. They're also an isolated energy grid, so they have less ability to maneuver and absorb power from other parts of the country during some of these periods of time. That extreme cold, longer than expected, also affected their other source of energy generation. They rely very heavily on natural gas energy production, and those gas lines froze.

So, it's this combination of things that happened — that were maybe a little bit different than the last time they experienced something like this that really helps expose some of the vulnerabilities.

I think that's the most challenging thing about extreme weather. For example, we figured out how to protect against hurricanes up to Category 4, but now we are seeing storms strengthen to Category 5. If a Category 5 were to become a Category 6 in the future—there isn't a Category 6 today, but there is discussion about whether we need one because of the wind speeds we are now observing—it would present even greater challenges.

We'll figure out how to do that. It's not often that we see after hurricanes, buildings blown to the ground any longer. Now we're dealing with the rainfall that comes along with these big storms, but it's these other types of events that make it really challenging for us to really get creative to think about how to become more resilient.

Secondary perils reshape our understanding of risk

Sivasubramaniam: Very well said. What's interesting to me is [that] sometimes I'm not sure if it's just our natural bias — once we see something, we see it everywhere. But so many of the recent events, if you look at it, you see a similar pattern, right?

So, for example, we have even seen in Spain, Valencia. So, we had rain, which led to flood, which led to mudslide. So secondary perils perhaps, but you know, all of them happened concurrently. It just has a massive impact. We've seen hurricanes, for example, on the East Coast.

We've seen significant unexpected loss events outside the hurricane area just because of additional moisture that came in. So, moisture goes in, goes to a place where it shouldn't — like say a hot oil tank, and all of a sudden you have a very different story, right

And so, it doesn't feel like it's isolated. You see that happening more and more just interactions of different variables that we can't predict. It's very difficult. So, it's almost an unknown of unknowns.

Caminiti: Yes, and to your point about this, this bias of, you see it once and you see it multiple times. We do end up spending more time focused on maybe things that we didn't talk about in the past. And it may have to do with the fact that we've actually gotten really good at controlling for the primary thing.

I mentioned hurricanes. So, you're referring to Hurricane Helene last year, that brought tremendous amount of rainfall to the Southeast. It made landfall across Florida. There was devastation in Florida, don't get me wrong. But we actually focused our attention as a community on the impacts in the Carolinas and through that region of the country. Because that devastation was so extreme. The storm was a powerful storm.

But we've become so resilient to the primary thing of wind and the surge that, that became less of a story because while there was still impact, it was these other things. So, part of the reason why we might be talking about some of these sort of secondary and tertiary impacts is because we have gotten good at controlling the primary.

But. I think it's a good lesson that we can't let our guard down and when we attack the primary concern, we need to then turn our attention to these secondary and tertiary concerns because we're seeing that they are quite devastating.

Resilience in action when catastrophic weather hits

Sivasubramaniam: We talked about some of the causes and things we should be thinking about. What are some of the things that customers can do to mitigate these?

Caminiti: Like I said, I think we've gotten really good at coming up with engineering solutions to address the known risks. And I think there's some really great examples. I mentioned — fortunately, with the number of landfalls that we've had from hurricanes, we don't often see the complete devastation or wiping out of communities.

Now it happens, right? We saw the western coast of Florida over the past couple of years take some pretty significant direct hits; and there were some communities that were significantly affected. But there's also great examples where communities and individual businesses have found ways to be tremendously resilient. Tampa took two direct hits last year, or near direct hits last year. Surge is the big concern. They've learned to engineer for wind, but surge is the concern.

There's a terrific example of a hospital in the Tampa area that made the investment in temporary surge walls. Now these walls have to be installed prior to an event, so it takes some preparation. They obviously have to be on hand and ready to go.

But it was really remarkable to see how effective this surge defense was. They set it up not once, but twice, because there were back-to-back storms and with both storms there was minimal impact to the hospital. It's an important hospital for the community to have that hospital online and accessible to the community during an extreme weather event is so important.

And to see that surge defense work so effectively, it really tells you that if you're willing to invest the time and energy and money in finding some of the defenses, there are a lot of things that we can do to significantly reduce some of our risk to this extreme weather.

Now, with that said, you're not going to engineer your way away from a direct hit from an EF5 tornado, “EF” being the Enhanced Fujita scale, that's used to measure tornado extremes between zero and five, five being the most extreme. There are very few buildings that would be able to withstand a direct strike from an EF5.

There's diminishing returns in trying to protect against that, but it's the less severe storms, the EF3, the EF2s, the ones, the zeros. Making sure that you're doing the right things to secure your equipment, to secure aspects of your building. That's really where you have the opportunity to make a difference in that type of extreme weather.

Extreme weather exposes the fragility of aging infrastructure

Sivasubramaniam: Very well said. I feel like that's probably two of the biggest misconceptions that I hear about extreme weather. One of them is — you nailed it right there — that is, we tend to focus on the worst possible case, and we think, “oh, we can't do anything about this.”

Between normal today and that there's a lot of things we can protect against, you had a great example in Tampa with the hospital. We've seen a lot of the wildfires all around the U.S. and Canada. There have been buildings that have been built in a resilient manner that withstood a lot of the stuff. Everything around is effectively burned down, but those buildings are so well intact because they had the right architectural build and advice when they constructed the building.

Those are just two perils as many other things you see this with. Probably the second misconception, I think is, and you've actually touched on it earlier on in one of your points was, often we hear a lot of these events, oh, you know, hurricane, category 5, whatever it may be. It's a one in 200-year event or this large wildfire one in a hundred-year event, but that was based on prior measurements and given how everything's evolving nowadays, it's one in every two or three years.

So, it's far more frequent. And on top of that, as you alluded to, our buildings are not constructed for this. They were constructed to the standards when that building was built. Might have been 50 years ago, might have been 10 years ago. But regardless, since then, the extreme weather itself has evolved so much. We are not up to date for it. So, we are not as prepared as even we think we are.

Caminiti: Yes. I mean, it's really an important point that you raise is that if we think there's nothing we can do about it. We get into this paralysis, right? I think that's where we need to make sure that we snap ourselves out of that and we say, “listen this is not something that's going to happen 20, 30, 50 years from now. It's happening today. There are things I can do.”

I think it's really important for companies to think about, and communities, to think about where their vulnerabilities lie. What are the things that are probably most likely to happen? To your point, we're in the insurance business, so we think about a lot of things, right? And I think sometimes people get a chuckle out of some of the things that we do think about. But we have to be careful that we don't spend too much energy thinking about certain things, right?

I mean, there's super volcanoes and asteroids strikes that can happen. Let's not go designing our resiliency around an asteroid strike. But let's realize that you know what, it's raining quite a bit these days and it rains a lot more than it had in the past, or it comes down a lot faster. And to your point, the community that was designed to handle the rainfall, and it's not just the weather, it's the combination of the weather and the population.

So that infrastructure was designed 40 years ago or 50 years ago. It's not handling the two- and three-times population growth that that particular community may have seen. It's not handling the extreme weather. You know, we see it in our day-to-day lives. And then from our business perspective, we see it in our losses. I mean, we've seen significant weather events where a key contributing factor to the loss was the infrastructure and the infrastructure's inability to keep up with the demand.

So, it's those types of things that I think is really important for businesses to be thinking about. What are the things that they're likely more vulnerable to? And then what are some of the defenses and preventative measures that they can put in place to either, you know, reduce or minimize the loss and then also recover.

That's a really important piece of it too. If there are things that you can do nothing about, there are things you can do to make sure you're able to recover from those things. And so, I think being prepared on the recovery side, in addition to the defensive side is probably equally important.

Sivasubramaniam: Very well said, Pete. Don't worry about the super volcanoes. Don't, worry about the asteroid strikes. Worry. Well, again, if the —

Caminiti: Yes, the super volcanoes and the asteroid strikes, we'll have some other things to worry about. But you know, if we, if we keep the things that are within our control in front of us — Again, I think there's been some tremendous advancements in technology and engineering. There's a lot of things we can do these days.

Sivasubramaniam: Absolutely. Well, Pete, let's wrap it up with that. Thanks for joining us, [I] enjoyed our conversation. And thank you for listening. If you like the show, leave a comment or review wherever you get your favorite podcast. Or drop us a note at media@zurichna.com. Stay tuned for our next episode in our miniseries where we'll dive deep into how extreme weather impacts construction. Alicia Pavelko, Head of Innovation and Sustainability, of Construction at Zurich North America. And Doug Stallman, Head of Construction Engineering at Zurich Resilience Solutions will be joining us. This has been Future of Risk presented by Zurich North America. Thank you.

1. Extreme weather cost $2tn globally over past decade, report finds, The Guardian, 2024.

2. Assessing the U.S. Climate in 2024, National Centers for Environmental Information, 2024.