Understanding the growing impact of natural catastrophes to improve corporate resilience

Natural catastrophes are a leading cause of losses and business interruption for corporates. From floods to windstorms to earthquakes to heatwaves, droughts and wildfires, no part of the world is immune from the damage caused by natural catastrophes. Add in the growing impact of climate change, increasing property values and building in vulnerable areas and it's easy to see why annual insured losses from natural catastrophes have been averaging over USD 100 billion globally in the last few years. 

Our interactive tool looks at the economic and insured loss experience from natural catastrophes in 13 countries and all global regions over the past 10 years. It examines the predominant natural disasters for each country and region, and the difference between economic losses and insured losses, or what we call the "protection gap", for the country or region. 

A significant percentage of economic losses from natural catastrophes is uninsured. The reasons for this can include lack of proper assessment of the risks in specific geographic areas and limited insights on risk exposure and needed coverage today and in the future. This lack of insurance protection can hamper businesses’ efforts to rebound quickly when natural disasters strike. Since commerce is often the economic backbone of most societies, this reduces a country's overall resilience in the face of natural catastrophes. 

Learn more about the potential impact in each country and the state of insurance coverage below.

The first step in building resilience to growing natural disasters is having a better awareness of the risks to your operations. While the information in the infographic above provides perils by country, our Risk Data & Services platform helps you understand your specific property, sustainability and supply chain exposures to weather in your locations around the world.

Risk Data & Services allows risk professionals to run scenarios on their key assets to better understand their vulnerabilities to climate change. They can even create digital twins of sites that can be stress tested against a pre-selected series of events, from storms to earthquakes. This provides companies with actionable risk insights to manage threats and better prepare for the future. Risk Data & Services allows them to efficiently obtain climate-related data insights that can be used for reporting purposes and support them in the context of new and upcoming sustainability regulations and disclosures.

This more granular understanding of your exposures helps you to take greater control of your risk management programme and reduce natural catastrophe protection gaps you face.

Find out more by clicking the Explore our Risk Data & Services button on any page of this infographic.