The ClimateWise Insurability Readiness Matrix

23 June 2026 – ClimateWise launches an Insurability Readiness Matrix, a first-of-its-kind tool to help insurers, financiers, corporates and policymakers understand and act on emerging insurability challenges before they become crises. 

Download the report 

Download the guidance notes  

Download the template  

Download the methodology 

About 

In March 2026, ClimateWise, supported by a dedicated Working and Advisory Group, developed a briefing titled The canary in the coalmine: Insurability as a resilience signal, setting out the critical need for a collaborative tool to support (re)insurers to assess and communicate insurability challenges. 

A first iteration of this tool has now been published in The ClimateWise Insurability Readiness Matrix: A shared language for action.  

The ClimateWise Insurability Readiness Matrix (“the Matrix”) acts as both a structured diagnostic and engagement tool for assessing, communicating and improving insurability across assets, sectors and places.  

At its core, the framework introduces a shared language for ecosystem-wide action and enables stakeholders to propose the precise levers needed to halt declining coverage, supporting coordinated action across the industry to help protect vulnerable communities from a widening insurance gap.    

The main report is accompanied by the following supporting documents which can be downloaded separately: 

• a guidance document to support the use of the template. 
• the matrix as an editable template (for use by stakeholders) 
• the report methodology 

A crisis that affects everyone 

Insurability represents a threshold where insurance is available and affordable. As extreme weather events intensify, insurability is emerging as one of the most important resilience signals. When insurance coverage is restricted, becomes unaffordable, or withdraws entirely, it creates an economic domino effect. Lenders cannot issue mortgages or loans against uninsured collateral, property values and tax bases decline, investment flees, and municipal finances come under strain. Disaster recovery becomes slower, costlier, and reliant on ad hoc government aid, driving financial inequality. The Insurability Readiness Matrix helps address this by identifying risks early and enabling (re)insurers to communicate them before markets retreat.  

Crucially, declining insurability is not inevitable - it reflects today’s policy and investment choices. By providing a shared framework across seven key drivers, the Matrix acts as a practical catalyst for collaboration between insurers, governments, and businesses, to keep insurance viable and create a “resilience dividend”, a virtuous cycle where proactive investment in resilience reduces risk, helps maintain affordable insurance, and reinforces the conditions for further adaptation. 

How the Insurability Readiness Matrix works 

The Insurability Readiness Matrix is designed as a structured diagnostic and engagement tool. It achieves this by evaluating insurability across seven critical components: Data and Modelling, Physical Resilience, Policy Alignment, Market Capital and Capacity, Stakeholder Awareness and Financial Literacy, Accessibility and Affordability, and Recovery Ecosystem. 

It evaluates insurability by assigning each of its seven core components a traffic-light status.  Crucially, these ratings are accompanied by a forward-looking trend signal - indicating whether the risk is improving, stable, or declining - and specific "Pathways to Green" that map out the targeted interventions and key stakeholders required to restore or maintain coverage.  

Who the Matrix is intended for 

The primary users of the Matrix are insurers and reinsurers, who draw on their underwriting knowledge and available data to complete the assessment. The primary audiences for its outputs are project financiers, developers, regulators, and policymakers. These stakeholders can use the Matrix outputs to inform early-stage project design, long-term development planning, credit risk assessments, and targeted policy interventions.  

How the Matrix was developed 

The Matrix was developed through a multi-stage research process combining cross-sector convenings across the (re)insurance, banking, academia, and civil society sectors, alongside a literature review and industry survey. The framework was tested in a pilot programme where insurers applied the Matrix to real-world scenarios - including floods in Tenbury Wells and Hull, wildfires in Yorkshire and Los Angeles, and agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa.  

Dr Nina Seega, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Finance at CISL, said:  

“In 2024, more than half of the world's natural disaster losses went uninsured. That is not just an insurance problem, it is a financial stability problem, a development problem, and ultimately a climate resilience problem. The Insurability Readiness Matrix is our contribution to solving it: a structured diagnostic tool that assesses the conditions driving insurability across seven components, from physical resilience and policy alignment to market capital and affordability, giving insurers, financiers and policymakers a shared language to identify where coverage is under pressure and what targeted action is needed to maintain it. Crucially, the Matrix connects directly to the recent work of our Banking Environment Initiative on 'Resilience-Adjusted Credit Risk', allowing lenders to systematically integrate these insurability and adaptation conditions into their own credit risk assessments.” 

Rachel Delhaise, Chief Sustainability Officer at Convex, said:  

“As insurers, we are well used to managing catastrophe risk, despite the increasing uncertainty associated with the impacts of climate change. However, as physical risks escalate in highly vulnerable areas, maintaining accessible coverage can be increasingly complex for the entire ecosystem. The Insurability Readiness Matrix offers a framework that supports earlier, more collaborative engagement. By clearly identifying the factors that drive coverage decisions—whether that is physical resilience or local policy alignment—it creates a shared understanding, making it easier for developers, governments, and the broader industry to explore how communities can remain protected and markets viable.” 

Jonathan Kassian, Head of Research at Flood Re, said: 

“ClimateWise’s Insurability Readiness Matrix gives decision-makers a tool to understand the risk factors that drive the full cost of insurance. Programs like Flood Re make sure those at greatest risk can still obtain insurance at affordable prices, but they do not remove the underlying risk – though our Build Back Better program is trying to improve this. In some other places, the subsidy equation is becoming untenable because of the underlying risks. Using ClimateWise’s tool can provide an early warning and assessment to address the underlying drivers to maintain insurability.” 

Liz Henderson, Global Head of Climate Risk Advisory at Aon, said: 

“To maintain the insurability of physical assets in a changing climate, it is essential that there is a two-way dialogue between the insurance industry and stakeholders on risk mitigation. To drive this process, the Insurability Readiness Matrix is a powerful diagnostic tool that delivers data-driven risk profiles of individual assets, outlining the physical, regulatory, and market factors that can cause coverage pressures. Using a shared language, it helps to move conversations toward the practical steps that asset owners and local governments can take to improve their risk profiles and secure long-term resilience.” 

Read the press release about the report 

Learn more about ClimateWise