*3.2. The Role of the Spanish Insurance Company, Insurance Compensation Consortium (Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros, CCS)*

The high loss potential from natural hazards and the need to make more generalized insurance cover viable has led many countries to involve the state in specific cover schemes, collaborating to varying degrees with the private market. The CCS is a government institution attached to the current Ministry of Economy Affairs and Digital Transformation. This institution has its legal personality and full capacity to act, and is subject to private law. This means that, although it is a government institution, it is subject to the rules contained in the legislation establishing the legal regulation and supervision of private insurance.

(**b**)

**Figure 3.** CCS's payouts due to damages caused by pluvial floods in Barcelona: (**a**) historical total annual amounts (1996 to 2018); (**b**) total historic (22 years) amounts grouped into diverse types of properties, according to CCS classification.

**Figure 4.** Consequences of pluvial floods that occurred in Barcelona on (**a**) 9 October 2018, and (**b**) 15 November 2018. Sources: a) https://www.elperiodico.com, and b) https://www.telecinco.es.

(**a**) (**b**)

The CCS covers so-called extraordinary risks, which include both natural hazards and those of a political or social nature, not expressly assumed by the insurance company issuing the standard policy. Its coverage encompasses losses derived from direct damage caused to people or to property, as well as business interruption due to the alteration of normal outcomes of production or business processes concerning such activity. The coverage of extraordinary risks is compulsory and is necessarily linked to underwriting (an insurance policy) in certain branches of insurance related to property (vehicles, home, etc.) and persons (life, accidents, etc.). All insurance policies rates include a surcharge to the

endowment of a common fund, under the principle of solidarity. Claims must be lodged within seven days following the damage event to the private insurer when it expressly covers the extraordinary event that caused the damage. Otherwise, the CCS will be responsible for the payouts, and could receive the claim directly from the policyholder or through the private insurer. A policyholder will be entitled to compensation after the damage assessment of an expert surveyor designated by the CCS.

When an extraordinary risk occurs, such as the pluvial flood events that hit Barcelona on 9 October and 15 November 2018 (Figure 4), the CCS sends one or more expert surveyors to provide an estimation of the extent of the damage. According to discussions with the CCS, these estimations are extremely close to the final payouts, which denotes the remarkable know-how of such experts. For these reasons, the depth-damage curves developed in this study are mainly based on the knowledge of a flood expert surveyor. In the same line, the curves developed by USACE [51] were based on the expert opinion method described in the Handbook of Forecasting Techniques (IWR Contract Report 75-7, December 1975) [52] and the Handbook of Forecasting Techniques, Part II, Description of 31 Techniques (Supplement to IWR Contract Report 75-7, August 1977) [53].
