As wildfires continue to burn across France, Spain and Greece this summer, new analysis from GlobalData showed just how little room French insurers had to absorb losses even before this year's fires broke out.
GlobalData's Global Insurance Database showed natural fire and hazard premiums in France totalled US$2.4 billion in 2024, against claims of US$2.2 billion, a margin of just US$218 million. That thin cushion sat in place a full year before this summer's fires, which have already burned through around 117,000 hectares in France since the start of 2026, the most since national records began, according to the EU's European Forest Fire Information System.
Unlike floods and droughts, wildfire is not covered by France's state-backed CatNat compensation scheme, meaning the full cost of this year's fires falls on private insurers rather than being shared with the state-guaranteed reinsurer Caisse Centrale de Réassurance. Morningstar DBRS has estimated total losses for domestic French insurers this year could reach between US$10 billion and US$15 billion, a figure that dwarfs the entire 2024 fire and hazard premium pool GlobalData cited.
The fires have already forced roughly 220,000 evacuations in France, with the fire front at one point advancing to within 15km of Bordeaux, Insurance Business UK reported in late July. Some blazes have since begun generating their own weather systems, a phenomenon described by France's interior minister as "autonomous, self-sustaining" fire behaviour that jumps firebreaks and rivers, a pattern that undermines the containment assumptions built into standard European wildfire catastrophe models.
Ben Carey-Evans, senior insurance analyst at GlobalData, said the figures are further evidence that insurers globally should be extremely concerned about climate change and severe weather. He pointed to a GlobalData poll from May 2024 in which 25% of respondents named severe weather events as the greatest risk facing the insurance industry, ranking second only to cyber threat. Carey-Evans said that finding, though now two years old, is more relevant today than when it was collected, underlining how long severe weather has sat near the top of insurers' concerns.
That concern is echoed in Munich Re's estimate that Europe accounted for just 5% of the €173 billion in global wildfire losses recorded between 2016 and 2025, a relatively small share globally that nonetheless leaves European insurers structurally underprepared, since wildfire risk in the region has historically been priced and modelled far less rigorously than in markets like the western US or Australia.
Carey-Evans said the long-term risk is that insurers pull back from personal and commercial policies in high-risk areas altogether, leaving large areas of land and population effectively uninsurable. He called it one of the most pressing issues in insurance today, warning that insurers and governments will need to work out how to keep insuring increasingly large areas as serious events become more frequent.
That warning lines up with a separate, EU-wide finding from the European Central Bank and EIOPA, which reported that only around a quarter of losses from climate-related catastrophes between 1980 and 2024 across Europe were actually insured, illustrating a protection gap that predates this year's fires by decades and extends well beyond France alone.
What makes GlobalData's 2024 figures notable is the timing: a margin this thin was already in place before a wildfire season that has gone on to set modern records in France and rank among Spain's worst in three decades.
If a below-average year for fire losses left French insurers with barely over 9% headroom between premiums and claims, a season like 2026, however it is ultimately reconciled from a claims perspective, is likely to force a hard conversation about pricing, appetite and, in the most exposed areas, whether cover remains available at all.
