12 March 2026
The risk landscape we face is becoming increasingly complex. Natural catastrophes are intensifying. Climate change is altering both physical and transition risks. Ageing populations are placing growing pressure on health and retirement systems. And events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated how rapidly shocks can cascade across economies and societies.
Yet, despite growing awareness of these risks, the financial burden of losses continues to fall largely on households, businesses, and governments. In many cases, only a small portion of losses is mitigated, transferred, or financed through structured risk management mechanisms. Closing these gaps between the economic losses and the losses that are actually covered, the protection gaps, is often framed as a question of expanding insurance coverage.
While insurance is an important component, the challenge is broader. Protection gaps arise from the interactions among multiple risks, institutions, and policy choices, and addressing them effectively requires a holistic, integrated approach.
Several structural realities necessitate such an approach:
1. Risks rarely occur in isolation
Many risks interact with and amplify one another.
A severe flood, for example, is not only a natural catastrophe event. It often leads to health concerns as well, and can disrupt economic activity, damage public infrastructure, strain health systems, and create significant fiscal pressure for governments. Similarly, health shocks can affect labour markets, household financial security, and long-term economic productivity.
When risks are analysed within separate domains, such as disasters, health systems, fiscal policy, or insurance markets, the responses often develop along those same boundaries. This can lead to fragmented policy approaches that address individual elements of risk without fully considering their interactions.
Developing effective resilience strategies, therefore, requires a comprehensive understanding of the risk landscape across multiple domains.
2. Solutions across different domains reinforce one another
Efforts to address protection gaps generally fall into three broad categories:
- Risk reduction, including prevention, mitigation, and adaptation measures
- Insurance and risk transfer mechanisms
- Fiscal risk financing, such as disaster funds, catastrophe bonds, or contingent credit facilities
These approaches are often discussed independently or assigned to different policy communities. In practice, however, they are closely interlinked.
Investments in risk reduction can lower expected losses and improve the insurability of risks. Increased insurance coverage can reduce the financial burden on governments following major shocks. Effective fiscal risk financing arrangements can provide governments with the liquidity needed to respond quickly and to support recovery efforts.
When these elements are designed and implemented together, they can reinforce one another and contribute to stronger overall resilience outcomes.
3. Institutional fragmentation often limits progress
Addressing protection gaps requires coordination across multiple actors.
Ministries of finance, insurance regulators, disaster management agencies, health authorities, and private sector institutions all have roles to play. However, these actors typically operate under different mandates, policy frameworks, and planning horizons. As a result, initiatives often develop within institutional silos, missing opportunities for coordination and leverage.
Bringing the relevant stakeholders together to develop a shared understanding of risks and potential solutions is therefore a critical part of effectively addressing protection gaps.
4. Evaluating interventions in isolation can underestimate their impact
Traditional evaluation approaches often focus on the direct costs and benefits of individual interventions. While this is important, it may not fully capture the broader system effects that arise when different policy measures interact.
For example, investments in flood protection infrastructure may not only reduce physical damages but also improve the insurability of affected areas and reduce future fiscal liabilities for governments. Similarly, expanding insurance markets can contribute to faster economic recovery following disasters and reduce the need for emergency public spending.
A more integrated perspective allows policymakers to consider these broader interactions and to better understand the overall resilience benefits of different policy options.
5. Fragmented approaches have not been sufficient
Despite significant efforts in many jurisdictions, protection gaps remain large across a range of risk categories. While individual initiatives have produced important progress, they have often lacked the coordination required to achieve systemic improvements.
This suggests that addressing protection gaps requires more than isolated policy measures. It requires an approach that brings together risk understanding, institutional coordination, and a comprehensive set of policy tools.
Moving from concept to implementation
Recognising the need for integration is only the starting point. We need practical ways to translate this principle into action.
In 2025, GAIP developed the GAIP Integrated Protection Gap Framework, providing a practical guide to adopt a structured process that begins with developing a comprehensive understanding of risks and vulnerabilities across different domains. This is followed by convening the relevant stakeholders across government, industry, and other institutions to develop a shared perspective on priorities. From there, we encourage the identification of a broad menu of policy options across risk reduction, insurance, and fiscal risk financing, before developing implementation pathways that align with institutional mandates and capacities.
This structured approach can help ensure that resilience strategies are both integrated and practical.
Strengthening the supporting infrastructure
Even when it is recognised that a more integrated approach is needed, there are often practical challenges.
Risk data and analytical tools are frequently fragmented. Disaster loss information, health system vulnerability data, and economic exposure estimates may sit in different institutions and use different methodologies. Bringing these together to form a coherent picture can be difficult.
To address this challenge, GAIP is developing the Asia Risk Platform to provide public sector stakeholders with a more holistic view of jurisdictional risks and protection gaps across multiple risk types, including floods, earthquakes, typhoons, pandemics, mortality, and health. By combining historical risk data, forward-looking risk assessments, and a knowledge repository of interventions across the three solution categories, the ARP aims to support more evidence-based decision-making.
Equally important is strengthening institutional capability. Designing integrated resilience strategies requires stakeholders to engage with approaches, tools, and risk domains beyond their traditional areas of expertise. Capacity-building programmes that bring together regulators, policymakers, and industry participants can therefore play an important role in supporting the development of integrated approaches. GAIP has been collaborating with the Asian Development Bank Institute on a Capacity Building for Risk Resilience Programme that aims to equip public-sector stakeholders with the relevant knowledge and tools.
Towards a more integrated approach to resilience
Protection gaps reflect the difference between the risks societies face and the systems in place to manage them. Closing these gaps requires more than expanding individual risk management instruments. It requires aligning risk understanding, institutional coordination, and policy tools within a coherent framework.
As risks become more complex and interconnected, approaches that recognise these interactions will become increasingly important. Strengthening resilience will therefore depend not only on the tools available, but also on how effectively they are integrated.
