Megacities

The fascination of megacities: people have always been attracted to cities. Indeed, the bigger the city, the greater the pull seems to be. The trend towards urbanisation increased steadily throughout the last century. Whereas only about 30% of the world’s population lived in cities in 1950, that figure has now grown to around 50%. The United Nations predicts that it will have risen to over 60% by 2030. Currently, some 9% of the urban population – around 280 million people – is concentrated in megacities; over the next ten years, that number is expected to grow to 350 million.

Megacities, in which people, values and infrastructure are concentrated in an extremely confined space, have far higher loss potential than rural areas. Consequently, even minor events can cause major losses.

Munich Re moved swiftly to address this issue, and has been investigating a number of important aspects since the beginning of the 1990s.