Swiss Re's sigma No. 1/2026 puts global insured natural-catastrophe losses at $145 billion for 2025, against total economic losses of $368 billion. That is a protection gap, the share of weather damage that no insurance covers, of sixty-one percent. In APAC the ratio is worse: Swiss Re's own sigma data puts insured losses across Asia at roughly $38 billion against $190 billion of total weather-related economic damage, a gap of eighty percent. Swiss Re Re, the reinsurance arm, wrote an estimated twelve percent of the global cat-bond and traditional retrocession volume behind those Asian policies. The firm measuring the gap is the firm pricing the cover that determines whether it closes.

The near-term test is the July renewal cycle in Singapore and Hong Kong, where regional cedants are finalising catastrophe excess-of-loss towers for the 2026 typhoon season. Aon's Reinsurance Solutions unit, in its April 2026 mid-year renewal outlook, flagged that APAC property-cat rates are holding flat to plus-five percent, while model updates from RMS and Verisk following Typhoon Yagi's 2024 Vietnam landfall have pushed expected annual losses upward by an estimated eight to twelve percent in the South China Sea corridor. The mismatch, flat rates against higher modelled exposure, means the cedants taking the most physical risk are the ones least likely to find affordable cover. Primary insurers in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, where penetration rates run below three percent of GDP according to the OECD's 2025 insurance statistics, will face the July 1 renewal date without the leverage to push back.