Most businesses can now map their physical climate exposures. Far fewer, however, have a plan they can present to their insurer. That gap is increasingly what separates the companies that hold on to affordable cover from those that do not.
Yvonne Moore (pictured), UK head of Zurich Resilience Solutions, explains why resilience programmes stall inside organisations. She also sets out what a proactive climate strategy does to an underwriting conversation, and why that exchange should not wait for renewal.
For many organisations, climate risk is now better understood than it is managed. The more pressing challenge is turning that understanding into a funded programme, and the obstacle is rarely awareness. Moore argues it is structural.
Resilience pays off over a timeframe that most corporate decision-making is not built to accommodate.
"The biggest challenge is that resilience creates value over long time horizons, while many commercial decisions are still made around annual budgeting and insurance cycles," Moore said.
The result is a mismatch that leaves adaptation competing for budget against projects with more immediate returns.
"A key barrier to overcome is that the business case can be difficult to prove," Moore said. "Return on investment can be realised over several years and be hard to quantify. Delaying action can increase future costs and heighten the risk of stranded assets, so it is sometimes the potential cost of inaction which becomes the biggest selling point."
The scale of that downside is not abstract. Global economic losses from natural disasters reached US$318 billion in 2024, of which 57% were uninsured, according to Swiss Re's sigma 1/2025 report. For a business weighing a resilience investment against a renewal cycle, that uninsured portion represents the exposure sitting on its own balance sheet.
"Even when a risk has been identified, translating that into the correct adaptation programme can be tricky," she said.
Part of the difficulty is that resilience does not belong to any single function. It cuts across risk, operations, sustainability, property, procurement and finance, and getting those teams to agree on priorities rarely sits within one person's remit.
The starting point, Moore said, is recognising how much has already shifted.
"A decade ago, you might have found that most businesses with strong climate change awareness had already suffered an incident, but in my experience that's no longer the case," she said.
Awareness is now widespread. The question is what a company does with it, and Moore's answer is to stop treating adaptation as a separate initiative.
"Climate adaptation needs to be reframed as part of everyday risk management rather than existing as a separate initiative, and then connected to on-going business decisions," she said.
"Those could be capital upgrades, maintenance programmes, refurbishment cycles, supply chain reviews, and business continuity planning. This should prevent adaptation being viewed as something new, costly or disconnected from business priorities."
That shift in framing also changes the nature of the insurance conversation. An insurer reviewing a proactive client is assessing a different risk from one confronted with a history of losses and no forward plan.
"From an insurance perspective, a proactive strategy means being able to show insurers that future risks are understood, prioritised, and actively managed," Moore said. "Shifting the conversation from past losses to demonstrating how the business is reducing future risk can strengthen underwriting confidence and support long-term insurability."
For Moore, that is the direction the whole sector is moving: away from indemnifying losses after the fact and towards preventing them.
"By helping customers avoid, reduce, and manage losses before they occur, we are shifting the focus beyond building back better to building better before," she said.
None of this closes the protection gap in isolation, and Moore is clear that no single party can. Businesses, insurers, and governments each hold part of the solution, but the influence is not equally distributed.
According to Moore, businesses control the underlying risk, which gives them the most immediate ability to act. Insurers can price it and advise on it, while governments can set the policy and investment conditions around it. Neither, she notes, can strengthen a building or redesign a supply chain on a company's behalf.
For a risk manager, the practical takeaway concerns timing and scope. The relationship with an insurer works best as a continuous one, Moore argues, not an annual transaction, and it should extend beyond placement.
"Please don't wait until renewal to speak to your insurer,” Moore said. "The sector can do its best for you as part of an on-going conversation, not a once-a-year interaction. Ask whether broader services such as risk advisory services are available, not just insurance placement.
"The organisations that will be most successful over the next decade are not those that perfectly predict climate risks. They are the ones that build a repeatable process for identifying vulnerabilities, prioritising adaptation and demonstrating progress."
