Global reinsurers are content presenting their 2025 natural catastrophe loss reports with a climate change backdrop, despite one of the year’s costliest events sitting somewhat outside that narrative.
As 2026 unfolds, the industry faces renewed scrutiny over how well its messaging aligns with actual risk patterns.
You might, for example, argue that the Los Angeles wildfires that caused significant economic damage and loss of life in January 2025 were less due to climate and extreme weather, and more due to widescale fire risk management failures. And then again, you might not.
Regardless, Munich Re chose to issue its 13 January 2026 commentary on last year’s natural catastrophe statistics under the banner ‘Climate change presses on’. The reinsurer singled out flooding, severe thunderstorms and wildfires as non-peak perils that together accounted for almost all insured losses over the review period.
Non-peak was an interesting phrasing, and your writer can only assume it serves as a synonym for the more commonly used ‘secondary perils’. Reinsurers typically regard hurricanes and earthquakes as primary perils, with other natural catastrophe events, weather-related or not, grouped into the secondary perils category. The board-level commentary accompanying the report looked beyond this phrasing to expand on the 2025 loss experience.
“The year got off to a rough start, with very high losses caused by the wildfires in Los Angeles,” said Thomas Blunck, Member of the Board of Management, Munich Re. “Sheer luck spared the United States [US] from hurricane landfalls in 2025, but the country is still number one in loss statistics, owing to the increasing trend towards very considerable damage caused by non-peak perils.”
The year 2025 is the first in the last decade that the US has not suffered a direct hurricane hit.
Rising natcat economic losses
The headline economic and insured loss numbers are sobering. Natural disasters caused around US$224 billion in economic losses in 2025 compared with $368 billion in 2024, with insurers covering around $108 billion ($147 billion in 2024).
Insured losses remained above the key $100 billion mark, but more or less matched the 10-year, inflation-adjusted average of $107 billion.
Global fatalities came in at 17,200, higher than in 2024, but also below the long-term average. Munich Re reported an average 17,800 natural catastrophe-related fatalities per year over the past 10 years, and 41,900 fatalities per year going back three decades.
Zooming in on the non-peak perils category, the reinsurer said that floods, severe thunderstorms and wildfires caused $166 billion in economic losses, of which $98 billion was insured. These three secondary peril categories thus caused around 90% of last year’s insured losses.
“Scientists largely agree that such natural disasters are becoming more severe and more frequent in many parts of the world,” Munich Re wrote, concluding that the 2025 loss experience could have been far worse.
Munich Re acknowledged the Los Angeles wildfires as “by far the costliest natural disaster of the year”, attributing it to a hazardous combination of drought and strong winter winds. Overall losses from this event totalled around $53 billion, with insured losses of roughly $40 billion. Thirty people lost their lives.
The high ratio of insured-to-economic losses from the Los Angeles wildfires weighed on the insurance gap. According to Munich Re, this single loss event caused the full-year uninsured loss ratio to improve dramatically to just 50% compared to the 10-year average of 60%.
Myanmar suffered the second-biggest natural catastrophe loss last year following a magnitude 7.7 earthquake in March. The earthquake caused around $12 billion in economic losses, with a mere $700 million in insured losses. Notably, damage was experienced up to 1,000 kilometres from the epicentre, including in Bangkok, Thailand.
“This was first and foremost a humanitarian tragedy, with around 4,500 fatalities,” noted Munich Re.
Despite no hurricane making landfall on the US Eastern Seaboard, the US still featured in four of the top five insured loss events in 2025. The Los Angeles fires aside, severe thunderstorms spanning several days and impacting central and southern US states caused $7 billion in insured losses in March; and two separate series of tornadoes and severe storms caused $4 billion and $2.9 billion in insured losses in May.
Outside the US, Hurricane Melissa caused around $3 billion in insured losses across Jamaica, Cuba, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Panama, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Hurricane Melissa has been acknowledged as one of the strongest hurricanes to make landfall since record-keeping began, generating wind speeds of close to 300 kilometres per hour.
Benign natcat losses for Africa
Africa experienced a relatively benign natural catastrophe year. Munich Re estimated total natcat losses of approximately $3 billion across the continent, of which less than US$600 million was insured.
Most of the losses stemmed from severe cyclones, including one that hit the French island of Réunion in February and two that impacted Madagascar and Mozambique in January and March. The continent’s loss numbers “do not reflect losses attributable to heat waves or droughts, as is the case for data across all regions worldwide”.
Revisiting the climate change theme, Munich Re reminded readers that numerous studies have indicated that climate change increases the frequency or severity of weather disasters, if not both.
“A warming world makes extreme weather disasters more likely,” said Tobias Grimm, Munich Re’s chief climatologist. He described 2025 as “another very warm year” and warned that “under the prevailing circumstances” climate change would likely worsen further.
For some end-of-article fun, your writer risked it all by asking the much-praised Grok AI to sum up this piece with a one-liner on the climate change threat. The large language model, which has up-to-date access to information across the world wide web, did not disappoint, describing the climate change challenge as human-caused, real, urgent and worsening.
The AI was comfortable with including climate change as a contributing factor to the California wildfires, but warned that “pinning the entire disaster on climate change ignores preventable human elements like land management, infrastructure, and ignition prevention.”
As for its founder, Grok reported that Elon Musk was in broad agreement that climate change was caused by human activities, though he has expressed scepticism about aspects of the narrative. He acknowledges the risks introduced by climate change, but believes they will materialise over longer timeframes than alarmists predict.
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