The Insurance Development Forum has called for urgent, coordinated action across governments, regulators, insurers, and development partners to increase insurability and accelerate resilience-building, and to tackle uninsured natural catastrophe losses which last year reached over US$180bn.

It has launched a new paper – Increasing Insurability to Close Protection Gaps – in which it outlines the challenges and sets out over 50 recommendations for addressing the widening divide between insured and uninsured losses from natural catastrophes.

The IDF says that of the uninsured losses from natural disasters, emerging markets and developing economies bear the brunt of the economic and development impact. In many of these nations, insurance penetration remains around 3%, leaving governments, companies, and citizens dangerously exposed.

Among the key recommendations from the IDF report are increased investment in risk reduction, with governments adopting building codes that enhance nat cat resilience, restrict development in hazard prone areas, and invest in open hazard data weather networks, and resilient infrastructure.

It also suggests regulators and policymakers should explicitly prioritise insurability, insurance market development, and proportional, innovation-friendly regulation, adding that new insurance products should be tailored to local needs to better address human behavioural barriers to risk mitigation.

Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general, Insurance Development Forum, said: “For too long, we have accepted that large swaths of the world are ‘uninsurable’, leaving their populations unprotected. But ‘uninsurable’ should not be a verdict – it should be a challenge. This paper dares to redefine insurability not as a fixed characteristic of a market, but as a condition we can create through policy, innovation, and collective will.

“If we make risks once deemed uninsurable insurable, we will have done more than close a financial gap – we will have redefined what it means to protect, partner, and prosper.”

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