Flood Resilience

Floods affect more people globally than any other type of natural hazard and cause some of the largest economic, social and humanitarian losses. There is a growing natural hazards protection gap between the total economic losses and the insured proportion of those losses that highlights this problem needs to be tackled both by traditional risk transfer mechanisms such as insurance, and by leveraging the insurance industry’s knowledge on risk management and risk reduction. By using Zurich’s risk expertise as a global insurer, we can help customers and communities reduce the devastating impacts of floods - even before a flood hits - and build community flood resilience in a more integrated way.

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, a multi-sector partnership focusing on finding practical ways to help communities strengthen their resilience to floods globally – and save lives was launched in 2013. In the first phase of the program, we have reached over 225,000 direct beneficiaries across our 13 programs in nine countries. For more information on phase 1 2013-2018, download the alliance report and share our knowledge on our own flood resilience portal.

Our aims and pledges

We focus on shifting from post-event recovery to stress the importance of pre-event resilience building. Our vision is that floods have no negative impact on people’s and businesses’ ability to thrive. Our aims are:

Supporting the generation of USD 1 billion in additional funding for flood resilience
Encouraging effective public policy in support of flood resilience
Developing sound practices and policy support for flood resilience
Measurably enhance flood resilience in vulnerable communities across the world.

Zurich is a signatory of the 'United for disaster resilience' statement, the insurance industry’s statement in support of disaster risk reduction. Zurich has also made a voluntary commitment to the 'Insurance industry commitments to build disaster resilience and promote sustainable development'.

flood resilience alliance logos

Closing the Water Window

Over the course of 2016-19 to accelerate the impact of Zurich Flood Resilience Program’s work the Z Zurich Foundation invested USD 10 million through the Global Resilience Partnership’s Water Window Challenge. Read more in the summary report

Water Window Challenge ZZF summary report 2019 (2.64 MB/PDF)

Sharing Zurich`s business expertise on flood resilience

We use our expertise to share insights and promote flood risk reduction for our customers and society. There is an urgent need to learn more and better understand how large flood events turn into disasters, and for this we developed our Post Event Review Capability (PERC).

The Flood Resilience Alliance phase 2

In July 2018, we announced the extension of the flood resilience alliance for a second five year period. The alliance is comprised of nine organizations working together to enhance community flood resilience and drive more investment into this area.

Flood resilience news

Zurich's news releases on flood resilience.

Flood resilience articles

Read more about Zurich’s flood resilience program.

Zurich’s Flood Resilience Alliance phase 1

In 2013, Zurich, together with academic institutions and NGO partners, developed a flood resilience model with innovative pre-event mitigation measures to help the poorest communities in the world protect themselves from floods.

Global risks

Events are natural, disasters are not.

Flood resilience