EIOPA dashboard on the insurance protection gap
A public tool from the European insurance authority that measures, country by country and peril by peril, the share of natural catastrophe losses that remains uninsured.
The protection gap, the difference between economic and insured losses, is often quoted as a single global figure, which says neither where it lies nor why it exists. EIOPA's dashboard breaks it down: it combines historical losses, modeled risk estimates and insurance penetration rates, then gives each country and each peril (flood, earthquake, windstorm, wildfire) a score combining exposure and weakness of coverage. It separates the causes: cover missing from the policy, optional cover rarely bought, or cover available but too expensive. The supervisor uses it to target its work and governments to compare their regimes, though it imposes nothing. Its limit lies in the data: insurance penetration is poorly known in several countries, and the score reflects the quality of the information as much as the reality of coverage.
Released on December 5, 2022, the dashboard pulls together data from thirty European countries and a historical series from 1980 to 2021; EIOPA noted that only about a quarter of the losses caused in Europe by extreme weather and climate events had been insured.
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