Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. This trend, combined with inflation and urbanization in high-risk areas, is driving a continuous rise in losses from natural disasters worldwide. In 2025, global economic losses caused by these events reached €240 billion, more than half of which were uninsured.
The story many in the insurance industry tell about climate impacts goes like this: rising losses are forcing hard choices. Premiums must go up. Coverage must be pulled back. The industry is under strain.
What that story leaves out is the balance sheet.
Who profits, who loses?
New analysis by Reclaim Finance of ten of Europe’s largest insurers and reinsurers — AXA, Allianz, Generali, Zurich, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Lloyd’s, Mapfre, SCOR, and Hannover Re — lays bare a different reality.
Between 2010 and 2024, these ten companies accumulated €405 billion in net profits. Their average cumulative net income rose 60% over that period. Their non-life underwriting activities alone generated more than €80 billion in profits between 2020 and 2024 before counting investment returns. No single company in the study posted a combined ratio above 100% since 2020 — the standard measure of underwriting profitability.
The industry is not under strain. The industry is profiting. The strain is being absorbed elsewhere. The case of France is illustrative of a global pattern.
In France, the public reinsurer CCR — the backbone of the country’s natural disaster insurance scheme — posted losses exceeding €3.5 billion from its natural catastrophe activity between 2015 and 2024. Its reserves have been halved. Its capacity to absorb losses before triggering a state guarantee has fallen from roughly €6 billion in 2016 to roughly €4 billion in 2025.
In response, the French government raised the Cat-Nat system’s surcharge on home insurance policies in January 2025 — from 12% to 20% — adding approximately €20 per year to the average household bill. Policyholders are being asked to pay more to stabilize a system that private insurers have been progressively offloading risk onto by continuing to underwrite fossil fuel expansion.
Meanwhile, AXA‘s French property and casualty subsidiary generated €5.7 billion in underwriting profits between 2016 and 2024. In 2024 alone, AXA, Allianz, and Generali together earned €811 million in French property underwriting profits — while CCR ran losses. The same year that CCR absorbed 60% of all French natural catastrophe claims, up from a 52% average, private insurers distributed more than €22 billion in dividends globally, double their 2010 payouts. AXA, Allianz, and Zurich each now commit to returning 75% of net profit to shareholders.
A vicious cycle that can’t continue
The report lays bare how Europe’s largest listed (re)insurers are securing the best financial results in recent history, while the outcome of repricing and withdrawing from climate risks fuels an ‘insurance crisis’ for policyholders and the public.
The mechanism of this vicious cycle is worth naming clearly. Insurers collect premiums upfront, invest that capital, and reprice or cancel policies annually. They possess sophisticated models and understanding of future climate risk — but face no obligation to share that information or keep prices affordable. And with a chronic short-term decision-making horizon, they fail to use that risk knowledge to constrain fossil fuel expansion to stay within Paris Agreement goals.
When risks rise, they raise premiums or withdraw. The cost of climate change becomes someone else’s problem: the household that can’t afford the new rate, the municipality that can’t find a single willing insurer, the public reinsurer absorbing the tail risk, the taxpayer backing the state guarantee.
Over a thousand French municipalities found themselves without adequate coverage at the turn of 2024. In the overseas territories, Martinique’s territorial authority had its contracts cancelled outright. Home insurance premiums in France rose roughly 27% between 2020 and 2025. An additional 9% increase is expected in 2026.
And what is driving up all this accumulating cost? In significant part, the same industry that profits from it. Insure Our Future’s analysis in 2024 found that for 28 major property and casualty insurers, fossil fuel premiums represent under 2% of their total revenues — while their estimated share of climate-attributed losses (that they likely passed on to policyholders) nearly equaled what they earned from fossil fuel clients in 2023.
At the same time, insurers possess expertise and data that could be used to hold someone else responsible for costs due to climate change: those who created them. Subrogation is common practice within the insurance industry — to stand in the shoes of the insured and recoup losses from those responsible. Why isn’t the insurance industry pursuing subrogation claims against the fossil fuel sector?
The industry is accepting mounting societal harm, regulatory and litigation risk, and growing losses in communities it then abandons, eroding its own future markets — to protect a revenue stream and fossil fuel clients that are in structural decline as the world transitions away from fossil fuels.
Executive Summary (English)
Report (French)
