Catastrophic risk: an attempt to define a new concept of risk and the conditions of its coverage by the insurance markets.

Summary There is a new category of risk, called catastrophic risk, which refers to phenomena where the fear of a catastrophe creates real economic losses even if the catastrophe does not occur. SARS, BSE, GMOs, Y2K, are examples of these catastrophic risks. These phenomena are part of a general trend that is contemporary catastrophism and tend to multiply. Under certain conditions, we demonstrate that it is possible to insure companies against these risks by distinguishing the gap between the real phenomena of risk development and the media phenomena of panic associated with these risks.