David Osler, marine insurance editor at Lloyd's List, estimated cumulative war-risk claims across the conflict at about $2bn as of 3 September 1. War-risk cover is the separate policy a shipowner buys against war, mines, seizure and hostile attack, priced as a percentage of a vessel's insured value for each voyage into a listed area.
Underwriters replace paid claims out of future premiums, so a loss run of this size is repriced into every voyage through the listed waters, including the ships nobody has touched. Protection and indemnity clubs cancelled Gulf war-risk cover in August and then repurchased it on new terms , which is the market doing the same arithmetic in advance. A vessel off Yemen was written off as a constructive total loss in the same week .
The figure comes from one editor at one publication and covers the whole conflict rather than any single week, so it is an estimate of an aggregate rather than a tally of settled claims. Nobody publishes a running total of Gulf war-risk payouts, which is why an informed estimate is the best available number and why the next one is worth comparing against this one.
