Catastrophe cover premiums must be proportional to risk. Who checks?
7 min read
A company with three plants gets its catastrophe policy renewal. The premium has changed, and the letter does not say on what basis. The broker talks about risk zones; the company has no way of knowing which zones its buildings actually sit in, nor whether two of them, formally in the same class, are worth the same. The question nobody manages to put usefully is simple: where does that number come from?
It comes from somewhere, and the rules say where.
The obligation, and the fact that its deadlines have passed
Italy’s 2024 Budget Law — Law 213 of 30 December 2023, paragraph 101 — requires companies on the business register to insure the assets of Article 2424 of the Civil Code, section B-II items 1, 2 and 3: land and buildings, plant and machinery, industrial and commercial equipment. Five events are named: earthquakes, floods, landslides, inundations and overflows. Paragraph 102 adds the real incentive: non-compliance shall be taken into account in the award of contributions, subsidies or financial concessions, including those granted in the wake of a disaster.
The extensions have run out. The original deadline of 31 March 2025 was moved by Decree-Law 39/2025 to 1 October 2025 for medium-sized companies and 31 December 2025 for small and micro ones. One window remains open, for fishing and aquaculture, last extended to 31 December 2026. For everyone else the obligation has been in force for months: the question is no longer when do I insure, it is how much am I paying and why.
The regulation says what the premium is computed on
The answer sits in Ministerial Decree 18 of 30 January 2025, the implementing regulation, in force since 14 March 2025. Its Article 4 is headed Determination and periodic adjustment of premiums, and paragraph 1 states that the premium is set in proportion to risk, taking account also of the location of the risk on the territory and of the vulnerability of the insured assets, on the basis of the historical series currently available, of the hazard or risk maps of the territory available, and of the scientific literature on the matter.
Territorial hazard maps are public. So part of the basis on which the premium is computed can be checked by anyone, without asking the insurer for anything.
Paragraph 2 says a second thing almost nobody exploits: account is taken, in proportion to the resulting reduction of risk, of the measures adopted by the company, including through the collective organisations it belongs to, to prevent risks and protect the assets. Protective works already carried out must lower the premium — but to count they have to be documented, and that documentation sits scattered across designs, test certificates, site records and invoices that nobody has ever lined up for an underwriter.
What we published, and what we did not
We put online the part you can check for yourself: the catastrophe risk tool, free and with no sign-up.
It holds two figures, both national. The first is the seismic zone of all 7,896 Italian municipalities, from the Civil Protection Department list updated to May 2025: the administrative figure, the one an insurer cites first. We checked it against the official ISTAT list — a 100% match, no municipality uncovered — and cross-checked it against Lombardy Region open data: no discrepancy on the municipalities present in both.
The second is peak horizontal ground acceleration on the 10,751 nodes of the reference grid of Italy’s building code, published by the Ministry of Infrastructure. This is what actually separates two sites: Milan and Turin sit in the same administrative zone with almost identical acceleration, yet between two municipalities of the same zone the gap can exceed a third. The zone alone does not show it; a premium proportional to risk ought to see it.
The other two hazards the law names — flood and landslide — are not there, and the page explains why rather than simulating them. There is no national source that can be queried by point: the ISPRA API stops at the municipality, and the polygons must come from the seven river-basin district authorities, with different scales, classes and dates. Stitching them without carrying provenance would produce data less precise than its sources.
Three traps we found in the data
The units of acceleration are not stated. The source’s field description speaks of peak horizontal ground acceleration (ag) and stops there. At TR 475 the values run from 0.36 to 2.78: were they in g, that would mean 2.78 g, a figure that does not exist in Italy. They are metres per second squared, and that maximum corresponds to 0.284 g — the known Italian maximum. At TR 975 they rise to 4.03 m/s², that is 0.411 g. We established it from the range of values, because no statement of units existed.
Three municipalities have no single zone. Vejano, Pescorocchiano and Rome have territory straddling different base zones: the source assigns Rome the value 2A-3A-3B. For them the tool shows no single number, because the source gives none and inventing one would be the dataset’s first imprecision — on Italy’s most populous municipality. Another 629 municipalities carry regional sub-zones, which the tool reports separately rather than flattening.
The grid does not cover Sardinia. Not one node. All 377 Sardinian municipalities are in zone 4, the only Italian region entirely in zone 4, and the code’s grid leaves it out. So the tool refuses to answer where no node lies within twenty kilometres, instead of quietly returning values fetched from two hundred kilometres away.
In every view the source value stays on the page, verbatim: it is what you show if a loss adjuster disputes it, and we do not touch it.
What this tool is not
It is not insurance advice: it does not say whether a policy is adequate, does not estimate a fair premium and recommends no contract. It is not a survey: it says nothing about the state of a building or its structural vulnerability. It does not discharge the obligation, which only a policy discharges. And the seismic zone applies to a whole municipality: it does not separate two plants kilometres apart, which is exactly why the acceleration sits beside it, and that one is per point.
On acceleration, one clarification the building code requires and almost nobody reports: the code does not use the nearest node, it prescribes interpolation between the four surrounding the site. The tool’s values are the nodes’ own, they frame the order of magnitude and do not replace a designer’s calculation.
The two axes, applied here
Compliance. Article 4(3) of the regulation requires premiums to be adjusted periodically, partly to reflect advances in knowledge and risk modelling. That means each site’s position against the public maps is not a one-off check: it is surveillance, and it has to be kept the way an archive is kept when it must stand up to an inspection years later — with the source, the date and the map version next to every value.
Decisions. Site records, policy contracts, the documents of protective works already carried out and the public maps become a single operating model on which AI agents check, before renewal, what the insurer could see and what was never handed to them — always with an operator in command. Within the client’s own perimeter: on-premises on self-contained machines, or a dedicated cloud with a data centre in Italy, always with shared management.
Several plants and a renewal coming up? Half an hour with one of our engineers, at no cost: we start from your addresses and the public maps.