Climate change, nanotechnology and pandemics are shaping up as emerging risks that have the potential to swamp insurers and reinsurers during coming years.

And with every passing day the likelihood of a $100 billion insured loss catastrophe year striking is increasing.

David Brenner, a leading US lawyer, warned as much as he presented some of the new big risk areas that insurance and reinsurance companies will increasingly have to address when he spoke at Mealey's Global Reinsurance Forum in Bermuda.

Taking each of the three risk area topics, Mr. Brenner said the jury was "in" regarding climate change, it was "out" regarding nanotechnology, and it was "sleeping" regarding the risk of pandemics such as avian flu.

He said it had been extraordinary how things had turned around regarding climate warming "naysayers" changing their minds in the past year.

The United Nations was a joint participant of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which now says there is no question climate warming is happening, delegates at the LexisNexis-sponsored forum were told.

A table of the biggest insured losses between 1970 and 2006 shows a preponderance of metrological catastrophes, mostly hurricanes, as the biggest risk events in recent years - with the 2005 losses of Katrina leading the way. Once updated the top ten list will be even more top heavy with events from the last few years as losses associated with January's European windstorm Kyrill and the UK summer floods weigh in at $10 billion and $7 billion, respectively.

Mr. Brenner quoted Lloyd's of London chairman Lord Peter Levene who spoke on global warming and said: "We are looking at bigger hurricanes. We believe a $100 billion natural mega-catastrophe is getting closer and could hit the (US) Atlantic coast."

He underlined this by noting the fierce strength of the desert winds that fanned the devastating California wildfires last month, and the depletion of water reservoirs in parts of the US.

Listing areas of associated risk and liability, he said: "Mega storms, melting ice and flooding, shifting weather patterns, increase risk of fire and the effects on forestry, agriculture and fisheries and different vectors for disease. There is liability possibilities for companies that cause (greenhouse gas) emissions, liability for poor resources or poor planning (such as the Hurricane Katrina-associated instances involving Murphy Oil, and the class actions citing failures in construction and management of the New Orleans city levees) and disclosure exposure."

On the last point Mr. Brenner said insurers and reinsurers were most likely to see claims coming through directors and officers liability policies where major companies fail to disclose information that show they have a liability towards impacting global warming, or are proven to be major emitters of greenhouse gases.

Moving to nanotechnology, the lawyer said it was still debatable as to the likely impact on insurance claims that could result from the new technology. But he wondered if it could be the 21st century's equivalent to the asbestos claims of the last century.

The pioneering technology involves everyday materials that have different properties at extreme microscopic dimensions and can be manipulated to create new products such as medication that is delivered into a human body which can target individual cancer cells "basically cell by cell cancer chemotherapy", flexible body armour and invisible sunscreen that gets absorbed into the body and, because it is on such a molecular scale, there is nothing to prevent it travelling through the blood and into brain tissue.

"What will it do there? We don't know," he said. "That is the problem with nanotechnology. The effects are not known and can be chronic. Funding has not been there for research (into the consequences)."

Potential impacts he foresees would come through workers' compensation claims, general and product liability, product recall and environmental damage claims.

A final area of potential risk liability is pandemics. The most recent global scare has involved the spread of avian (bird) flu and its potential to become a potent, highly contagious threat to humans.

Regarding pandemics, Mr. Brenner said: "The jury is sleeping. In general not much is happening."

A true pandemic occurs when it affects one quarter of the planet. During the last century the largest was the outbreak of Spanish Flu in 1918 which killed between 40 and 50 million people. Smaller pandemics were the Asian Flu in 1957, which killed two million and Hong Kong Flu in 1968, which killed one million.

The debate today is whether our ability to manufacture better vaccines would outweigh the potential for speedier transmission of pandemics caused as a reult of greater global mobility of people through air travel and alike.

Mr. Brenner said it was also important to factor in instant global communication that now exists and would likely work in mankind's favour by quickly raising the alert of a growing pandemic and allow faster countermeasures, including travel restrictions, to stem the potential spread of a virus between communities and countries.

In conclusion, he said: "Reinsurers would do well to continue to closely follow developments with respect to potential liabilities arising from nanotechnology and the impacts of climate change. However, risks are far from unknown.

"It would be premature to consider an exclusion in either area since there is neither a scientific foundation to justify it nor an obvious legal risk to exclude. Rather, much insurance remains to be written."