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. By using our risk expertise as a global insurer, we can help customers and communities to reduce the devastating impacts of floods, even before a flood ever hits – we call this flood resilience. Zurich, together with academic institutions and NGO partners, has developed a flood resilience model with innovative pre-event mitigation measures to help the poorest communities in the world protect themselves from floods.

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'.

Zurich is using its expertise as part of the flood resilience program

Through our cooperation with the IFRC, the flood resilience program can reach communities right across the world through 189 national societies

Practical Action is developing innovative ideas on ways technology can improve the lives of the poorest

We work with our research alliance members to better understand, measure and reduce flood risk and make the case for pre-event mitigation

New solutions for the age-old problem of floods - the Water Window Challenge

Zurich Insurance Indonesia has launched Z-Alert, the disaster alert mobile app that gives reliable and timely risk alerts

Read more about Zurich's flood resilience program

How we measure impact

The Zurich flood resilience program helps communities better cope with flood risks. To demonstrate the impact of our approach, we needed a measurement tool. We found no practical toolkit that suited our needs. So, in December 2013, the alliance began to develop something suited for this purpose. Read more

Pre-event risk reduction is the focus of our efforts across the Zurich flood resilience program. We know that prevention is cost-effective, but nearly 87 percent of disaster-related spending on aid goes into emergency response, reconstruction and rehabilitation, and only 13 percent toward reducing and managing the risks before they became disasters. But flood resilience cannot be enhanced by one stakeholder alone, that is why we have created a multi-organizational partnership to enhance societal flood resilience in 2013. We call this the Zurich flood resilience alliance (‘the Alliance’).

5 years later, more than 110 communities in 9 countries have benefited from Alliance projects. In the Flood Resilience phase 1 report we provide a short overview of the input, output and achievements (‘impacts’) of the Zurich flood resilience program, including the Zurich flood resilience alliance. The impact of the program over the past 5 years encourages us to move forward with the Alliance 2.0 until 2023.

Report - The Zurich flood resilience program

Executive summary - The Zurich flood resilience program