Climate Crisis and Natural Disaster Predictions for 2026: Expert Opinions

Digital Insurance contacted insurance professionals to comment on the climate crisis and natural disaster predictions for 2026. Processing Content Dr. Oliver Wing, chief scientific and product officer, Fathom As we head into 2026, the insurance industry will begin to divest itself of the dangerous assumption that the past is a reliable guide to current flood risk. The escalating impacts of climate change are happening now, rendering the small sample of historical flood loss observations even more obsolete. The strategic imperative for carriers is to embed consistent, global, and climate-adjusted data at the heart of their operations, from underwriting to portfolio management. This forward-looking approach allows insurers to accurately price risk with property-level granularity, manage accumulations with confidence, and ultimately close the protection gap. For 2026 and beyond, leveraging this next generation of hazard data is not simply a tick-box innovation, but a fundamental requirement for solvency and sustainable growth in a more volatile world. Rick McCathron, president and CEO of Hippo Climate risk modeling is emerging as a critical add-on to traditional CAT models. As severe weather becomes more frequent and disastrous, insurers need tools that look beyond historical data. While CAT models are important for assessing near-term losses, their historical data approach can't fully capture how climate change is affecting future risk patterns. Next-generation climate models help to forecast how shifting temperatures, storm intensity, and precipitation may impact future risk exposures. When combined with traditional CAT models, they can offer insurers a more dynamic view of risk, enabling better underwriting decisions, coverage design, and resilience planning. Integrating climate modeling into everyday risk management will become a defining capability for forward-thinking insurers. Chris Lowell, managing director, InnSure Cities and counties will be an emerging distribution channel for data, analytics, and product innovators in the risk management space. As climate-driven risks continue to accelerate, forward-thinking communities will look to engage with risk transfer and mitigation providers who can address the impact of climate risk on residents and help pilot solutions. Insurance innovators will need to step up to help support these communities, with or without incumbent carriers, and recognize the market potential to launch and scale new products and services that address the most pressing climate risk financing challenges. Kevin Stein, CEO, Delos Insurance Solutions Wildfires will continue to evolve their patterns and geographic footprints in part due to unprecedented climate conditions. Insurers treating wildfire as a specialist peril, who use deep levels of scientific expertise, depth of data, and modeling sophistication to drive their underwriting models, will be the only ones able to profitably write insurance in wildfire-stressed locations. Matt Coleman, chief risk officer, Demex Primary carriers having to shoulder the burden of losses from frequent severe convective storms will continue to be a feature of the property market. However, carriers will have the opportunity to access an increasing range of innovative alternatives to traditional reinsurance to mitigate these losses. Sean Kevelighan, CEO, Insurance Information Institute In 2026, climate and resilience are expected to be key priorities in the insurance industry. Climate risk is driving higher insurance costs, as losses from floods, wildfires, and severe storms continue to rise due to changing weather patterns and population growth in vulnerable areas. Insurers are moving beyond reactive catastrophe response toward proactive risk mitigation, using advanced modeling, satellite data, and AI to better predict and price climate-related exposures, and are shifting from simply pricing risk and paying claims to preventing losses, with investment in resilience and technology strengthening underwriting and claims processes. Yet climate risk doesn't exist in a vacuum; outdated regulations, inflation, and litigation trends also drive costs, highlighting the need for shared responsibility among all stakeholders. Lauren Menuey, managing director, Goosehead Insurance The biggest challenge going into 2026 will be unpredictability of weather, and Third Party Litigation Funding. Carriers cannot predict the weather, so while most feel they have the right product and pricing in most markets today, that could change if weather related losses mirror 2024 vs. 2025. 2025 was a relatively low CAT year, which was good for carrier profitability. There have also been several bills introduced at the state and federal level related to TPLF. Some would be good for the insurance industry, and some would be bad. That later could extend or worsen a hard market, resulting in higher insurance premiums and fewer options for consumers. Geoffrey Lehv, SVP, head of North American Accounts, kWh Analytics As the parametric world evolves, expect to see emerging applications that build a more diversified portfolio of exposures. For example, we recently introduced a parametric product for energy investors that pays out if a shortfall in wind resources leads to inadequate revenues for a wind farm operator. For an underwriter, this is a diversifying risk to a portfolio of hurricane-linked parametric products. The changes in climate and weather will create new opportunities, many of which will be created and structured by innovative MGAs. Jeff Davis, vice president, GTS Operations, Crawford Global Technical Services 2026 will bring heightened uncertainty for insurance carriers, not only in the severity of nat cat events themselves, but in the volume and timing of claims that follow. Even with advances in modeling and predictive analytics, storm behavior remains highly erratic, often disrupting expectations around when, where, and how insured losses will manifest. This volatility will create new complexities for carriers and their partners as they plan for post-event response. From staffing strategies to surge-readiness models, organizations will need to strengthen their ability to pivot quickly, aligning resources to the scale and concentration of losses as they unfold. George Hosfield, VP & GM, Home Insurance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions In 2026, climate volatility is expected to remain a defining force across the P&C landscape, with catastrophe frequency and severity continuing to outpace historic norms. To stay resilient, carriers will need to both better engage the consumer as a partner in risk mitigation, and integrate forward-looking climate analytics, property condition data, and predictive risk modeling into underwriting and pricing, turning reactive loss management into proactive risk prevention