Education key to lessen impact of climate disasters on those uninsured – RSA’s Ken Norgrove

The insurance industry must focus on resilience, education and preventative measures to lessen the impact of climate disasters on the uninsured, many of whom may be too high risk to insure in the traditional manner.

That was according to RSA’s chief executive Ken Norgrove, who spoke on a panel at Financial Times’ global insurance summit 2025, entitled Climate change – as natural catastrophes worsen, how will the industry respond?

The volume of climate and extreme weather events has grown in recent years and by some estimates has caused £1.55tn ($2tn) in economic losses since 2014.

And Norgrove said that over the last five years, climate-related losses have exceeded £79bn ($100bn).

“We’re never going to be part of the entire solution to climate-related losses and therefore everything from building codes to building resilience and adaptation is where we focus,” he continued.

”We start to focus in on what can we do from an adaptation and resilience point of view for clients, for communities and particularly for municipalities.”

Norgrove also explained communication is key to reducing losses, with it being key to get the message across to those who are uninsured.

He said: “What we’ve learned over the past 10 years – particularly in Canada where we’ve reached out to 30 million Canadians – [is that] for those who take action of the back of that communication, the loss reduction is 70%, just through education.

“We will be there to cover insured losses, that will continue, [and] we will get better at it. Modelling and artificial intelligence (AI) will improve that technology over time, but actually the real question is how do we help the 70% [of uninsured losses].

“It’s got to be adaptation, building resilience, education and influencing governments [around] building codes and municipalities.”

Social responsibility

Norgrove also theorised that with the recent advances and uptake of AI and risk modelling, many customers may find that they have been identified as too high risk to enter the risk pool.

This issue, he said, may fall into the realm of social responsibility.

He explained: “We’re still experimenting around how those large language models can help us build better modelling and better exposure mapping, but [we’re] also trying to figure out how, as an insurance company, [we think] about the pooling facility.

“If you get too risk-based focused then you lose the ability to pool risk, because you start to price on individual risk.

“So actually, trying to pull away from that and say ’actually we’ve got an obligation to pool risk, not deselect risk’, that’s something I’d say we’re struggling with – you’re trying to balance your objectives as a financial organisation to derive the returns for your shareholders, with an obligation to say as an insurance industry we want to pool risk.”