The Caribbean Cat­a­stro­phe Risk In­sur­ance Fa­cil­i­ty (CCRIF) SPC has an­nounced a sec­ond pay­out of US$21.1 mil­lion to the Gov­ern­ment of Ja­maica due to the trig­ger­ing of the coun­try’s ex­cess rain­fall para­met­ric in­sur­ance pol­i­cy fol­low­ing Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa. This fol­lows a pre­vi­ous pay­out of US$70.8 mil­lion on Ja­maica’s trop­i­cal cy­clone pol­i­cy, bring­ing the to­tal re­ceived from CCRIF to US$91.9 mil­lion.

Ac­cord­ing to CCRIF, a par­tial pay­ment of US$8 mil­lion from the trop­i­cal cy­clone pol­i­cy was trans­ferred to the Gov­ern­ment on No­vem­ber 3 to pro­vide im­me­di­ate liq­uid­i­ty. The re­main­ing US$62.8 mil­lion is ex­pect­ed to be trans­ferred by No­vem­ber 13, in line with the fa­cil­i­ty’s com­mit­ment to mak­ing pay­outs with­in 14 days of an event. The ex­cess rain­fall pay­out is al­so ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed with­in the same time­frame, pend­ing fi­nal mod­el ver­i­fi­ca­tion.

CCRIF’s para­met­ric in­sur­ance cov­er­age forms part of Ja­maica’s dis­as­ter risk fi­nanc­ing strat­e­gy, pro­vid­ing ac­cess to quick fund­ing to as­sist pop­u­la­tion sup­port mea­sures, restora­tion of pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture, and con­ti­nu­ity of es­sen­tial ser­vices. Ja­maica cur­rent­ly main­tains CCRIF cov­er­age for trop­i­cal cy­clone, ex­cess rain­fall, and earth­quake events. The trop­i­cal cy­clone pol­i­cy is trig­gered by mod­elled loss­es from wind and storm surge, while the ex­cess rain­fall pol­i­cy is based on rain­fall vol­ume and dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Pri­or to these pay­outs linked to Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa, Ja­maica re­ceived three pre­vi­ous pay­outs from CCRIF re­lat­ing to Trop­i­cal Cy­clones Beryl, Eta, and Ze­ta. Since its es­tab­lish­ment in 2007, CCRIF has is­sued 82 pay­outs to­talling US$483 mil­lion.

CCRIF CEO Isaac An­tho­ny is sched­uled to vis­it Ja­maica to meet se­nior of­fi­cials re­gard­ing on­go­ing re­cov­ery ef­forts and fur­ther fi­nan­cial pro­tec­tion plan­ning.