economic losses

Insured losses from catastrophe events across the globe in the first half of 2026 are estimated to have reached $47 billion, significantly down on last year’s $100 billion, with severe convective storms (SCS) including hail, damaging straight-line winds and tornadoes, remaining the costliest insured peril on a global basis, according to broker Aon.

The Catastrophe and Risk Solutions group at Verisk has estimated that economic losses from the June 24, 2026 earthquakes in Venezuela will likely exceed USD 10 billion, with a higher degree of uncertainty than usual in estimating the insured share of industry losses due to Venezuela’s macroeconomic conditions, elevated inflation, low insurance penetration, and sanctions-related […]

While headline global insured catastrophe loss estimates are all pointing to a tally below averages, reinsurance broker Gallagher Re has highlighted that for the United States the $100 billion of insured losses experienced in 2025 was around 12% above the 10-year average.

According to insurance and reinsurance broking group Aon, global insured losses from natural disaster events in 2025 reached $127 billion, marking the sixth consecutive year that insurance payouts have exceeded the $100 billion threshold.

Just a few days after we wrote about the still-apparent protection gap, between economic and insured losses, due to typhoon Soudelor, figures from China show that on flood events the gap is as wide, with $18.4 billion of economic loss due to flooding in 2015 so far.

Typhoon Soudelor, which struck Saipan, Taiwan and China recently killing at least 41 people and wreaking destruction from strong wind and torrential rainfall, has once again highlighted that the protection gap, between economic and insured losses, remains wide.

An Aon Benfield report shows that economic losses from global natural disasters for the first six months of 2014 totaled $54 billion, roughly 49% below the 10-year (2004-2013) average of $106 billion.

A professor of civil engineering at Kansai University, who is also part of the Japanese government’s Central Disaster Management Council, estimates that a magnitude 7.3 earthquake beneath Tokyo could cost as much as $3 trillion dollars (300 trillion yen) in economic losses.

Reinsurance firm Swiss Re’s sigma unit, which analyses and quantifies economic and insured losses from natural and man-made catastrophe events in its reports, has put an estimate on global catastrophe losses from the first-half of 2013 at $56 billion of economic losses and over $20 billion of insured losses.

The latest sigma study from reinsurance company Swiss Re has been published today and it shows that natural catastrophes and man-made disasters in 2012 caused economic losses of $186 billion and insured losses of $77 billion. A number of large-scale weather events in the U.S. helped to push up the insured loss total for the […]