Marine insurance traditions are being upended as a new wave of shipboard fires forces insurers to rethink risk from the hull up
In 1688, more than 300 years ago, underwriters in a London coffee shop organised the earliest known Lloyd's insurance contract for a ship that set sail from London to Jamaica. Today, marine insurance underwriting principles - and even the policy documents themselves - contain clauses that are decades, even centuries old. Yet, in the traditionally conservative world of marine insurance, the industry is being forced to rewrite the rulebook in response to a modern peril: the explosive fire risk posed by lithium-ion batteries. These energy-dense batteries, now ubiquitous in modern electric vehicles (EVs), are shipped in colossal volumes aboard mega-sized container ships and car carriers, raising the stakes for catastrophic loss at sea.