Extreme weather events around the world, such as wildfires and storms, were the major driver behind $107bn in insured losses in 2025, according to industry data.
The Los Angeles wildfires alone caused record-high $40bn in insured losses from fires, says a new report from reinsurance company Swiss Re.
The report notes that, while overall insured losses in 2025 were lower than previous years, this was due to a “[luck] rather than a reduction in risk”, partly due to no major hurricanes hitting the US.
Insured losses refer to damages that are compensated for by insurance companies.
Despite lower losses in 2025 than the trend over recent years, they are still rising by an average of 5-7% each year since 1996, accounting for inflation, says Swiss Re.
The report itself does not explicitly discuss the role of human-caused climate change in the events driving these losses.
But the extensive ways in which climate change exacerbates and drives extreme weather are well established in scientific literature.
Other reports and media coverage also show how some parts of the world hit by frequent and intense extreme weather now face the possibility of becoming “uninsurable” due to unaffordable premiums or insurers pulling out of the market.
Below, Carbon Brief outlines three charts from the new Swiss Re report that highlight the role climate extremes had on insured economic losses in 2025.
- Most insured losses came from wildfires, storms and floods
- Wildfire losses soared to record-highs in 2025 due to the Los Angeles fires
- Losses are rising from thunderstorms – partly due to cost of replacing damaged rooftop solar panels
Most insured losses came from wildfires, storms and floods
The report finds that wildfires, floods and other “secondary perils” accounted for 92% of the $107bn in insured losses from “natural catastrophes” in 2025.
This is an all-time high for “secondary peril” losses and an increase from 56% over 2015-24 on average.
Secondary perils refer to more frequent, but typically less-damaging events, such as thunderstorms, floods, droughts, wildfires and snow. “Primary perils” are less frequent, but highly-damaging events, such as earthquakes and tropical cyclones.
Secondary events have been the fastest-growing category of insured losses from “natural” catastrophes over the past 55 years, according to the report.
The scientific field of “attribution” shows how global warming is making many of these events occur more frequently and/or with greater severity.
Thunderstorms, wildfires and floods are causing “rapidly growing insured losses with widely varying drivers worldwide”, says the Swiss Re report.
Although overall insured losses decreased to $107bn in 2025 from $137bn in 2024, the report forecasts that they could increase to $148bn in 2026, if the year aligns with long-term trends – or $320bn, if major events occur.
Insured losses only account for part of the wider economic losses from weather events, however, with less than half of losses being covered by insurance, the report says.
It adds that emerging economies have the largest gaps in insurance protection.
One contributing factor to the drop in insured losses between 2024 and 2025 was that no major hurricane made landfall in the US, where many people have insurance coverage for their homes or businesses.
Tropical cyclones accounted for 39% of these losses on average over 2015-24, compared to just 5% in 2025.
Hurricanes did cause destruction in other countries with lower insurance protection in 2025, however, such as Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.
The US has the largest insurance market in the world, in part due to the predominance of high-value assets when compared to other countries. As such, a hurricane not making landfall in the US brings down the overall total insurance losses more significantly than it would in other countries.
Globally, “growth in exposure” contributes to more than 80% of the increase in weather-related insurance losses since 1970, says Swiss Re. This is the term used by the insurance industry to refer to increasing vulnerability to losses amid rising risks.
The report adds that better modelling and improved adaptation and mitigation measures are “crucial” to reduce losses and maintain insurability in vulnerable areas.
Dr Balz Grollimund, who leads the company’s catastrophe model development, told a press briefing:
“We need to continue reviewing our models, our risk views and updating them so they are not anchored in the past. We want them to be anchored in the present day [and] the next couple of years, so we can really anticipate the risk that we are facing.”
Despite the known link between increasing extreme weather and climate change, the new Swiss Re report only mentions climate change in footnotes or in reference to climate modelling.
In contrast, the company’s 2025 “natural catastrophes” report explicitly mentioned climate change compounding losses and heightening extreme weather events at least six times.
Wildfire losses soared to record-highs in 2025 due to the Los Angeles fires
The Palisades and Eaton wildfires that ripped through parts of Los Angeles in January 2025 resulted in almost $40bn of insured losses – “by far the largest global insured wildfire loss events to date”.
The majority of insured losses from wildfires almost always come from the US, as the chart above shows.
Globally, wildfires burned at least 3.7m square kilometres of land – an area larger than India – over 2024-25, Carbon Brief previously reported.
Extreme events occurred in South American and African rainforests during this time, but these would not rank in insurance industry figures due to low or non-existent insurance cover.
The report notes that “high hazard intersects with high-value assets” in many parts of California, which contributed to the record-high losses in the state.
Typically, extreme weather events in global north countries cost more for insurance companies due to higher levels of insurance protection.
Insurance company Mapfre estimated that around 17% of losses from “natural” disasters are covered by insurance in Asia and 19% in Latin America. This compares to almost 57% in North America.
The total economic losses from the Los Angeles fires were estimated to cost $250bn-275bn, said the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Other impacts from the fires include job losses, health impacts from the smoke and damage to ecosystems, they noted.
The weather conditions that drove the Los Angeles fires were estimated to be 6% more intense and 35% more likely as a result of human-caused climate change, according to World Weather Attribution.
Losses from wildfires have risen “markedly” over the past decade, notes Swiss Re. Global insured losses from fires are increasing by around 12% each year.
The report adds that wildfires have accounted for an average of 10% of global annual “natural” catastrophe insured losses since 2015, compared to just 2% before 2015.
It also finds that the risk of wildfire losses in the US has been heightened by patterns of population growth. The increase in population in high-risk wildfire zones has been three times higher than the wider US since 1975, says the report.
Losses are rising from thunderstorms – partly due to cost of replacing damaged rooftop solar panels
Severe convective storms – also known as thunderstorms – resulted in $51bn of insured losses in 2025, Swiss Re finds, which is above the long-term trend.
These storms are severe events that can bring thunder, lightning, heavy rainfall, hailstones, strong winds and sudden temperature changes, according to the Royal Meteorological Society.
The rain from these storms tends to be very intense and localised in one area, the organisation notes, which can lead to “devastating” floods.
Climate attribution studies have shown that storms have often been made more severe or likely to occur due to climate change, as Carbon Brief’s interactive map reveals.
However, attribution of highly localised convective storms is “extremely difficult”, notes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It adds that there is “limited evidence” that extreme rainfall associated with these storms has increased “in some cases” as a result of climate change.
This type of storm has caused up to €50bn ($58bn) in economic losses in the EU since 2000, with Germany, France and Ireland worst-affected, according to a recent report from property data company Cotality.
Globally, 2025 was the third-costliest year for these storms, says Swiss Re, after 2023 ($72bn) and 2024 ($54bn).
One notable contributing factor to this $51bn cost is repairing damage to rooftop solar panels after hailstorms, the report says.
In 2024, the Guardian reported that large hailstones threaten solar infrastructure, with hail in Italy and Germany up to 10cm in size – large enough to “dent a car, smash greenhouses and break a solar panel”.
Grollimund from Swiss Re said that major hail incidents with “tennis ball-sized” hailstones appear to be increasing.
The report says that hail events with stones larger than 5cm are increasing most intensely in Europe, especially in northern Italy. This is driven by “rising low-level moisture and increasing atmospheric instability”, it says.
Hailstones can crack the front glass on a solar panel and cause other damage that can reduce its lifespan and yield, according to a 2019 report from researchers at VU Amsterdam.
The post How wildfires and storms drove insurance losses in 2025 – in three charts appeared first on Carbon Brief.
How wildfires and storms drove insurance losses in 2025 – in three charts
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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