Chairman: Kocu Andre Hutagalung, President Director – PT.  Reasuransi MAIPARK Indonesia

Vice Chair of Agricultural Insurance Working Group (AIWG): Nguyen Anh Ngoc, Insurance Association of Vietnam (IAV)

Vice Chair of AIWG: Reza Andre Nasution, Techincal Director – PT Reasuransi MAIPARK Indonesia

Natural disasters, in particular earthquake and typhoons, are endemic in the ASEAN region and occurring with increased frequency and severity.  Apart from those two, we have also been faced with other life-threatening risks caused by other kinds of natural disasters, which are tsunami, volcanic eruption, landslide, flood, and storm. With rapid economic and infrastructure development as well as urban population density growth across the region in recent years, there is a greater need for coordinated effort and collaboration to address the potential threats and manage the risks posed by such disasters; as the impacts may intervene our economic development since all disasters have upward trend.

At the AIC meeting in November 2007, a suggestion was made for a gathering of academic experts specializing in Asian natural disaster research and insurance practitioners to facilitate dialogue and information exchange. To spearhead this project, the ASEAN Natural Disasters Research Works Sharing (ANDREWS) Committee was formed under the auspices of the AIC, comprising representatives from various technical universities and relevant research institutes in ASEAN with several ASEAN countries as its members; namely Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.

Hence, the objective of the Forum is to provide a platform for insurance industry professionals, academics and university students from the ASEAN region to share and exchange information on the latest scientific research and developments relating to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and typhoons as well as risk transfer mechanisms for catastrophe risk management.

Throughout its development, ANDREWS has also established a specific Working-Group in order to further speed up the development and resolve some deferred issues within ANDREWS. With its first meeting inaugurated in January 2016, one of the Working Group’s goals is an adjunct to ANDREWS main objective; to establish the natural catastrophe pool in ASEAN based on scientific and knowledge, within template that consists of detail and aggregate to be used in data collection. The data will be very useful in the making of disaster maps and calculating the catastrophe risk.