Closing the protection gap: How insurance can evolve for an evolving risk landscape

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Organisations have always faced risks that insurance cannot fully cover. Some exposures are too uncertain to price; some losses may be too large for the commercial market to absorb. Increasingly, some emerging risks are simply too new and lack the necessary data for products to have developed. Against this backdrop, the persistence of protection gaps is not merely a commercial problem for buyers and insurers to negotiate around.

It is a question as to how insurance can continue to be relevant for the risks that matter most. For buyers, a perennial issue is the traditional, long-standing structure of insurance. Real-world risks are not neatly packaged by class of business. While the buyer has the role of translating those risks to the products offered by the insurance market, risks can fall between the cracks.

How can we address insurance protection gaps?

Despite growing attention to protection gaps, most reports focus on macro-level resilience or individual product classes, rather than on the specific challenges faced by underwriters and large corporations operating across an interconnected and rapidly evolving risk landscape – marked by cyber, artificial intelligence, climate, geopolitical instability, and supply chain fragility. That is a key part of the puzzle which this paper seeks to address.

Airmic and the International Underwriting Association (IUA) came together for a series of roundtables held under the Chatham House Rule in early 2026 with their members and leading market participants, with KPMG as a thought leadership partner. The result is this paper which draws on joint insurer-risk manager dialogue to examine how protection gaps emerge in practice, why they persist across complex programmes, and what a more coherent, system-aware approach to closing them could look like.