A Wasserstein GAN-based climate scenario generator for risk management and insurance: the case of soil subsidence
For the insurance sector, this provides a novel tool to simulate future drought patterns, enabling better risk assessment and strategy development for a hazard that accounts for ~30% of French natural catastrophe indemnities.
This paper introduces SwiGAN, a conditional GAN-based model that generates spatio-temporal trajectories of the Soil Wetness Index (SWI) up to 2050 for a drought-prone region in France, supporting adaptive risk management and insurance strategies. The model addresses the need for long-term climate scenarios beyond the one-year horizon of regulations like Solvency II.
According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (2025), the average annual cost of natural catastrophes increased from 70--80 billion USD between 1970 and 2000 to 180--200 billion USD between 2001 and 2020. Reports from organizations such as the IFOA and the WWF highlight the need for the insurance sector to adapt to this rapidly evolving context by developing medium- to long-term strategies that go beyond the one-year horizon of prudential regulations such as Solvency II. This paper introduces an artificial intelligence framework based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (Conditional GANs) to generate future spatio-temporal trajectories of climatic indices. The approach focuses on the Soil Wetness Index (SWI), a key indicator used in France to assess drought severity. Drought accounts for approximately 30% of the indemnities paid under the French natural catastrophe insurance scheme. The proposed model, SwiGAN, simulates plausible drought propagation patterns up to 2050 for a region of France particularly exposed to this hazard. By generating realistic sequences of SWI maps, SwiGAN provides insights into drought dynamics under climate change scenarios and supports the design of adaptive risk management and insurance strategies. The methodology is also generalizable to other climate-related perils and actuarial applications such as economic scenario generation.