Europe insures a quarter of its disaster losses. Von der Leyen wants an alliance to change that
In her State of the Union address, the Commission president announced a European alliance for climate risk insurance. Around 25% of catastrophe losses in the EU are covered by private insurance, and the rest lands on national budgets.
One line in Wednesday’s State of the Union address will get less coverage than the headline items, and it is probably the one that touches household finances in Portugal most directly. Only about a quarter of losses from catastrophes in Europe are covered by private insurance. The rest ends up where it always ends up, on the national budget.
Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission will create a European alliance for climate risk insurance. There is no regulation yet, no timetable and no figure attached. What there is, is a problem named out loud, which is further than this usually gets.
The summer, as the Commission counted it
The Commission president put numbers on the European summer: 660,000 hectares burned, some 12 million tonnes of crops lost, more than 35,000 excess deaths during heatwaves, and rivers on the scale of the Danube, the Rhine and the Garonne visibly shrinking. She also repeated that Europe is warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the world.
None of that is abstract at this end of the peninsula. Portugal was already inside the story on the evidence: half the EU’s territory was in drought in July, and burnt area across Europe passed the previous year’s total before the summer was even over.
What an insurance alliance would actually do
The logic is easy to state and hard to build. When a risk is rare and scattered, the market insures it. When it becomes frequent and concentrated, the same fire season hitting the same band of the map, insurers either raise the premium or withdraw, and the places left without cover are precisely the most exposed ones. That is why the idea on the table in Brussels involves pooling risk at European scale rather than leaving it inside each member state.
Alongside it, the Commission promised a climate resilience framework that will map the 100 most vulnerable territories in the Union and assess the level at which each risk should be managed, from European down to local. A European plan on heatwaves is also coming, built around earlier warnings and better-prepared health services.
Worth filing away for when the texts appear. Portugal already passed a national climate adaptation strategy running to 2030 that was criticised for leaving the funding vague. An announcement in a plenary chamber and a published regulation are different objects, and the distance between them is usually where measures like this shed their ambition.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: © European Union, 2026 (CC BY 4.0)
