The Earthquake will Pass, Life will Continue

Mesut Güçlü
Secretary General, Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool

The Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP) has worked on all cylinders to fulfill its duties and responsibilities in 2021, which has been the case since the first day. The works and projects we carried out in 2022 involve new topics put on the agenda in 2022, in addition to the ongoing and regular ones. In this article, we will cover the works of TCIP in 2022.

Based on the approach of “The Earthquake Will Pass, Life Will Continue,” TCIP mediates in ensuring that citizens can continue their lives following an earthquake. Since its establishment, TCIP has been carrying out activities regarding the acquisition of the “Compulsory Earthquake Insurance” policy by the people and the management of the system. It has been working by its mission to encourage all citizens of Turkey, an earthquake-prone country, to prepare for an earthquake. At the heart of this task is preparing Turkey for a safer future.

Thanks to the “Our Priority is Trust, Our Responsibility is Assurance” project developed by TCIP, one of the most important steps has been taken to carry Turkey to a safer future, with the motto “Long Live Prevention!” This project, implemented by TCIP and the Ministry of National Education targeting 4th graders, started in the 2018-2019 academic year and reached 70,000 students in 500 schools in the 2021-2022 academic year with the aim of increasing students’ awareness of earthquakes and “Compulsory Earthquake Insurance” by organizing special events for the 1-7 March Earthquake Week and 23-28 May Insurance Week. As for the 2022-2023 academic year, training programs were carried out in 250 schools in 25 provinces. As a result, we have reached approximately 500 thousand people. You can access all the content related to the training prepared for the 1-7 March Earthquake Week, from the “Social Projects” tab at dask.gov.tr and TCIP Turkey YouTube channel.

This year, we held the “Earthquake Resistant Building Design Competition” for the seventh time. Our objective is to offer civil engineering and architecture students the opportunity to work in earthquake-resistant building design and model making, introduce earthquake engineering, encourage students to specialize in this field and raise awareness of earthquake-resistant buildings.

As TCIP, our priority is to provide support to our citizens as soon as possible during and after natural disasters and to ensure business continuity. Based on this, TCIP Emergency Management Center was opened in Ankara, and its main data center was moved to Ankara, with a backup in Istanbul.

The floods and forest fires we have experienced in the recent period brought up issues regarding other types of natural disasters that could be integrated into TCIP and the transformation of “Compulsory Earthquake Insurance” into “Disaster Insurance.” In this respect, we started working on including other types of disasters, especially floods, in the compulsory earthquake insurance, taking into account the public interest. Within this framework, we are creating a product that will meet the demands of insurance companies and citizens with an experienced team of academics. We aim to complete our work in the first quarter of 2023.

As of 2022, TCIP updated the tariff and coverage of the Compulsory Earthquake Insurance by increasing the discount on policy renewals and doubling coverage.

As we leave behind a year in which we took successful and strong steps, we invite all our citizens to secure themselves financially with the “Compulsory Earthquake Insurance” and become a part of our target of a 100 percent insurance rate.

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