Swiss Re's sigma No. 1/2026 puts APAC natural-catastrophe insured losses at $67 billion for 2025, against total economic losses of $161 billion. The protection gap, the share of weather losses that no insurance covers, ran to $94 billion, or fifty-eight percent of what the storms and floods actually cost. Swiss Re collected $43.2 billion in property catastrophe reinsurance premiums across Asia-Pacific in the same year. The firm measuring the gap is also the firm pricing the treaties that decide how wide it stays.

The proximate cause of the gap is not a shortage of models. It is a shortage of insurance penetration below the urban tier. RMS, now Moody's RMS, put typhoon-season modelled losses for the Philippines, Vietnam, and Bangladesh combined at $31 billion for 2025, against insured losses of $2.9 billion across those three sovereigns, a nine-percent penetration rate that Moody's RMS disclosed in its Q1 2026 catastrophe-model update -- a disclosure Moody's made while holding $1.2 billion in catastrophe-model licensing revenue linked to the same exposure. Parametric products, contracts that pay against a physical trigger rather than an assessed claim, covered an estimated $800 million of that $31 billion modelled loss, according to the Global Parametrics annual brief published March 2026. The World Bank's Southeast Asia Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility is scheduled to price its next sovereign parametric tranche in Q3 2026, covering the Philippines and Vietnam, with a target coverage floor of $600 million per named storm above Category 2.