Financial protection against catastrophic risks: Floods, fires and other major risks

This report aims to support government efforts to build financial resilience against catastrophic risks and mitigate the social, economic and financial consequences of unprotected financial exposures. Such support is becoming increasingly important; insurance markets play a critical role in providing financial protection against risks, yet evolving changes are testing the ability of private insurance markets to achieve broad coverage.

The report provides a framework to assess the need for government-supported financial protection and the advantages and disadvantages of the main approaches to offering such support. It applies this framework to three types of large-scale risks, natural hazards, infectious disease outbreaks and cyber-attacks and incidents. It further examines insurance coverage for wildfire risk and the design of flood risk insurance programmes.