Pricing uncertainty: how insurance can anchor resilience in a time of systemic risk

Nadia Boumeziout, Head of Sustainability and Information Governance, Zurich Insurance, Middle East

The world is not becoming more dangerous, but it is becoming more observable. The disruptions currently cascading through energy markets, trade corridors, food systems, and infrastructure are not surprises. They are the materialization of risks that were always present but rarely priced, rarely planned for, and rarely integrated into the strategies of governments and organizations until the moment of crisis made them impossible to ignore.

That gap between known risk and acted-upon risk is precisely where insurance has a role to play, as an active architecture of resilience.

Insurance, at its core, is a discipline of anticipation: before a policy can be priced, a risk must be identified, modelled, and assigned a probability.

When insurers and reinsurers model climate-related physical risks, they are generating granular data about which assets are exposed and under what conditions. When they model supply chain disruption or political violence, they are mapping the interdependencies that most corporate risk functions still treat as background noise. This intelligence, applied earlier and shared more broadly, can meaningfully inform how organizations and policymakers approach resilience investment.

The Middle East offers an example. The UAE's response to the April 2024 and March 2026 flooding events demonstrated strong emergency response capabilities, while also highlighting the challenges faced by infrastructure anchored to historical climate baselines. It also underscored the scale of the adaptation challenge, even where significant investment is already underway. The insurance sector's exposure to those events, and the subsequent reinsurance repricing, provided a clear market‑based signal about the growing costs associated with adaptation gaps.

The same logic applies to energy transition risk, trade route vulnerability, and food security. The disruption currently affecting fertilizer supply chains and commodity flows through contested maritime corridors is not invisible to insurers: it is reflected in war risk premiums, in the withdrawal of cover from certain routes, and in the conditions being placed on policies for assets in exposed geographies. These are early warning signals embedded in commercial decisions. They deserve to be treated as such.

And they do not sit in isolation: a sustained shock to energy supply compresses margins across food production and logistics; food insecurity generates political instability; political instability reprices sovereign and trade credit risk; and the cycle compounds. Insurance sits at the points where systemic stress becomes measurable, and that visibility is worth sharing.

The insurance sector's contribution starts with an openness to sharing risk intelligence, not just risk products, and genuine collaboration with clients and partners. It also means developing parametric and index-based instruments that pay out quickly and predictably, alongside a commitment to closing the protection gap in the markets and communities most exposed to systemic shocks.

Governments, corporates, and development institutions are best placed to integrate insurance early into infrastructure planning, procurement design, and national adaptation strategies before crisis strikes. Risk transfer works best as one layer within a broader resilience strategy, not the only one.

For all parties, this requires recognition that resilience is not a static condition. It is a continuous process of identifying where systems are fragile, investing ahead of disruption, and building the institutional memory to learn from near-misses rather than only from losses.

Insurance cannot absorb all of this risk. What it can do is help the world see it more clearly, price it more honestly, and plan for it more deliberately.

That, ultimately, is the case for resilience, rather than optimism or contingency planning that is filed and forgotten. It is the disciplined work of mapping what could go wrong, and building the financial, physical, and institutional systems that hold when it does.