The urgent climate action insurance brokers want their clients to take

Extreme weather events have grown increasingly common and severe in recent years, causing economic damage of more than US$200 million per day, on average. In the past three years alone, 62% of businesses have suffered severe disruption due to extreme weather.

But despite the impact natural catastrophes are having on global business, our research shows that many organizations have yet to take the practical steps available to them to mitigate these risks and protect their operations.

Brokers like yourself are more likely to be aware of the shifting risk landscape. This presents an opportunity to deepen client relationships and position yourself as a strategic advisor on climate risk mitigation.

This article will help you. It highlights where the key knowledge gaps are and provides actionable recommendations to help you add value to your clients by helping to protect their businesses.

What is the ‘climate resilience gap’?

At FM, we call the difference between client perceptions around natural catastrophe risks and the actual risks facing their global operations the “extreme weather resilience gap”. This gap in awareness could explain why many clients have yet to form a consensus on how best to manage emerging climate risk exposures.

For example, when we polled 800 risk decision-makers from industrial, manufacturing, and tech companies in 2025, we found that three quarters underestimate the risks wind and flood exposures represent in the countries their organizations operate in. 

Our research also highlighted a range of underutilized loss prevention techniques that the 150 brokers we surveyed said can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively to enhance resilience against climate risks. These include:

• Risk resistance wind fastenings
• Hail resistant roofing materials and protective coverings
• Automated wildfire detection and protection systems

At the same time, our survey highlighted several regional differences in how businesses are responding to evolving natural hazard risk exposures.

For example, many Spanish businesses are decommissioning all buildings located in flood plains, many French businesses have installed hail defenses, while those in the UK are leading the way on wind-resistant fastenings. Meanwhile, one in three Australian companies say a lack of engineering expertise is among their greatest barrier to resilience against extreme weather events.

These differences underscore the importance of building partnerships with loss prevention experts who can combine local teams and expertise with the latest science-backed risk mitigation techniques.

How to maximize your clients’ resilience

We are entering a new era for climate resilience. Protecting individual locations isn’t enough. Resilience depends on adopting an engineering-led approach that anticipates and mitigates business continuity risks across clients’ supply chains.

With more 200 years of commercial property insurance experience and an on-the-ground presence in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia, FM can provide the expert advice to guide your clients to better risk outcomes.

We have a wide range of resources you can use to apply cutting-edge climate science to improve your clients’ risk exposures. These include:

• FM Data Sheets: A comprehensive library of engineering guidelines that help reduce the risk of loss due to factors including extreme weather
• Natural Hazards Toolkit: Interactive maps and other guidance to help organizations prepare for and respond to extreme weather events
• FM Resilience Index: A tool that ranks 130 countries and territories by their resilience to disruptive events
• FM Climate Resilience Tracker: An interactive dashboard that visualizes current and future climate risks across client locations

We also partner consultatively with brokers to deliver collaborative, engineering-led solutions tailored to each client’s needs. When they are planning a construction project, their dedicated account engineer will be on-hand to provide best practice advice. For larger projects, they can use FM’s Plan Review service to ensure that their plans mitigate foreseeable risks.

If you have a client you think could benefit from our extreme weather and climate resilience expertise, we’d love to hear from you. Submit a new business enquiry here and we’ll be in touch ASAP.

This is part of a series of articles FM is producing to help brokers understand the value we can provide to their commercial property insurance clients. Look out for the next post in this series for more valuable insights.