As the world prepares for the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, the Forum for Insurance Transition (FIT) convened by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has issued a landmark COP30 Insurance Communiqué, “Insuring the Transition”, calling for a more systematic approach to reduce climate risk, improve insurability, and build inclusive, resilient and sustainable communities and economies.
In 2024 alone, global economic losses from natural disasters reached USD 368 billion, marking the ninth consecutive year losses exceeded USD 300 billion. Around 60 per cent of these losses were uninsured, a significant protection gap that leaves households, businesses, and governments increasingly vulnerable. As climate change and nature loss impacts escalate and lead to greater economic and social losses in every region of the world, the communiqué warns of a looming global insurability crisis that could lead to other financial services becoming unavailable, impacting various economic sectors.
“As society’s risk manager, the insurance industry’s message is loud and clear: economic losses and the protection gap will increase further if the emissions and adaptation gaps persist, and if we continue to destroy life-supporting natural ecosystems that build our resilience to extreme weather events,” said Laurence Tubiana, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement and Special Envoy to Europe of the COP30 Presidency. “A global insurability crisis will exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis and present a systemic risk to financial stability. This communiqué sends a powerful signal that reducing climate risk and improving insurability require a systematic response—one that bridges insurance, finance, policy, the real economy and society. I fully support the creation of a multistakeholder international taskforce to address this challenge.”
The communiqué highlights the insurance industry’s triple role as risk managers, risk carriers, and institutional investors in supporting climate resilience and decarbonization, protecting and restoring nature and biodiversity, and promoting social and financial inclusion. It calls for these roles and capabilities to be recognized in global policy frameworks and incorporated into countries’ national climate and biodiversity goals and action plans.
“This communiqué is a clarion call for a whole-of-society approach to reduce climate risk, protect nature, and close the protection gap,” said Butch Bacani, UNEP’s Head of Insurance. A world that is more inclusive, resilient and sustainable is a world that is more insurable. This is why COP30 is a pivotal moment in time to insure the transition and enable the future we want for present and future generations. Time is non-renewable.”
The communiqué proposes the creation of an International Taskforce on Climate Resilience and Transition Insurance that would bring together insurers, the wider financial community, financial supervisors, governments, corporates, civil society and international organizations to take forward the following recommendations:
- Assess and map climate-related risks, losses, and insurance protection gaps across regions, sectors, and income groups under different climate change and nature scenarios to support effective, fair approaches to risk sharing and enable communities to make informed choices about the risks they face
- Provide practical guidance to finance ministries and regulators on how to incentivize loss prevention, strengthen insurance markets, and design fairer, more sustainable approaches to risk sharing
- Strengthen the capabilities of governments, finance ministries and supervisory bodies to address climate and nature risks systematically, including creating the role of a country risk officer to lead climate and disaster risk reduction efforts
- Mobilize transition insurance and finance by exploring policies that might incentivize insurers to contribute more directly to insuring and financing the clean energy transition, the nature-positive transition, and resilient infrastructure
- Set up the right enabling environment to support the development and scaling of catastrophe risk models that integrate climate change and nature, and of risk transfer solutions that can expand affordable and sustainable coverage, particularly in underserved markets
- Identify policy approaches to make insurance accessible and affordable for vulnerable households, marginalized communities, MSMEs, and critical sectors such as agriculture, while avoiding arrangements that entrench inequality or weaken incentives for loss prevention
Download the communiqué: