Enhancing Insurability Against Natural Disasters is a Solutions Paper published by the T7 Task Force on Insurance in March 2026. It focuses on how G7 countries can help close the natural disaster insurance protection gap, improve financial resilience, and make disaster risk coverage more affordable, sustainable, and accessible, especially for vulnerable and low-income countries.
Key insights:
The paper explains that natural disasters are increasingly disrupting economies worldwide, with especially severe impacts on vulnerable low-income countries.
It highlights a widening insurance protection gap, meaning that many households, businesses, and countries remain exposed to disaster losses without sufficient insurance or financial protection.
The paper argues that insurance is only one part of resilience, but it can play an important role when combined with prevention, preparedness, risk reduction, and public financial support.
A major recommendation is to distribute costs more fairly and effectively between the public and private sectors, including through stronger public-private insurance frameworks and clearer burden-sharing rules.
The paper calls for expanding insurance markets while protecting consumers, improving insurance literacy, and ensuring that insurers benefiting from public support also contribute fairly.
It emphasizes the need to build resilience into public-private partnerships by linking disaster insurance schemes and infrastructure investment to measurable resilience outcomes.
The paper also recommends stronger multilateral coordination between the Global Shield, regional risk pools such as African Risk Capacity and CCRIF, multilateral development banks, and G7 countries.
For developing countries, the paper highlights the importance of parametric insurance, microinsurance, catastrophe bonds, forecast-based financing, and pre-arranged finance that can pay out rapidly after disasters.
It stresses that physical risk data must be better understood and shared through open-source tools, fiscal impact assessments, natural catastrophe risk indicators, and hazard exposure platforms accessible to governments, communities, and vulnerable groups.
The paper also warns that parametric insurance is useful but not a complete solution, because it requires reliable data, transparent triggers, consumer safeguards, and measures to reduce basis risk.
Main message: Closing the disaster insurance protection gap requires stronger public-private cooperation, better risk data, faster pre-arranged financing, stronger resilience investment, and fairer access to insurance tools for vulnerable countries and communities.
