SEADRIF’s 2025 Annual Report offers insurers practical lessons from Southeast Asia on turning disaster risk financing into scalable protection through product innovation, rapid payouts and public-private collaboration.

For insurers grappling with rising disaster and climate risk, SEADRIF’s 2025 Annual Report offers something particularly useful: lessons from putting new approaches to financial protection into practice, rather than simply discussing what might work.

Protecting What Matters: Scaling Disaster and Climate Risk Insurance Across Southeast Asia examines what it takes to move development insurance beyond pilot programs and build sustainable protection at scale.

It explores both the progress made and the challenges that remain, giving insurers insight into where their expertise, capacity and capital can contribute.

The report draws on SEADRIF’s experience in Lao PDR, including the development of #PEOPLE, a world-first sovereign parametric product triggered by the number of people affected by a disaster as reported by government.

It also examines rapid payout delivery and the mobilisation of private reinsurance capacity; practical examples of how insurers can work alongside governments and development partners to close protection gaps.

For insurers looking ahead, the report also provides a window into emerging opportunities.

New regional initiatives are being developed to extend financial protection to public infrastructure and agriculture, demonstrating how disaster risk insurance could expand across different sectors, countries and perils.

As SEADRIF Insurance Company CEO Benedikt Signer says: “Southeast Asia has the capital, the mandate, and the expertise for development insurance to work. What’s been missing is putting them together into protection at scale.”

For insurers, the report provides a valuable case study in how that ambition can become commercially and operationally viable protection; and where the industry can help take it next.