EP 412 - How Climate Resilience Is Transforming Insurance in Asia - Shwetank Verma and Bernhard Kotanko

Across Asia, climate risk appears to be rising faster than the systems designed to manage it. Floods, fires, extreme heat, and storms are seemingly more frequent and more destructive, while large parts of society remain underinsured or completely unprotected.

In this episode of ATP featuring Bernhard Kotanko, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, Hong Kong, and Shwetank Verma, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, discuss how climate risk is no longer a distant or technical problem for insurance in Asia. It is a daily, lived reality that is exposing deep structural weaknesses in how insurance protection is designed and delivered.

Some of the topics that Bernhard and Shwetank covered in detail include:

• The insurance protection gap in Asia is real and it is getting larger, not smaller.
• GDP is becoming intangible, meaning that natural catastrophe losses can look less dramatic relative to GDP even while the physical economy absorbs bigger shocks.
• A lot of climate loss ultimately lands on public balance sheets and pretending this is “private” is fantasy.
• Loss prevention is cheaper to than reapir, but funding prevention is harder to finance.
• Insurance can be an “apex predator” that forces better building behavior through building codes and construction standards.