New report finds U.S. insurers than ever before are reporting climate risks but not measuring them

BOSTON, May 20, 2026 —Four years after the U.S. insurance industry began standardized climate risk reporting, Ceres released a new report, which finds that while more companies than ever are reporting their climate-related financial risks, the quality of disclosure remains deeply insufficient, with the vast majority of carriers falling far short of the substantive, decision-useful reporting that regulators, investors, and policyholders want. 

The 2026 Progress Report: Climate Risk Reporting in the U.S. Insurance Sector analyzes disclosures from 537 insurance groups submitted to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' (NAIC) Climate Risk Disclosure Survey for reporting year 2024. This is the fourth consecutive year that Ceres has produced this analysis. 

The analysis, conducted with AI-powered sustainability intelligence provider Manifest Climate, evaluated insurer responses against the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) framework. For the first time, it examines the quality of how carriers reported, evaluating specificity, quantification, and accountability across 77 individual datapoints and four years of data, from 2021 to 2024. 

“Four years into standardized climate risk reporting, the U.S. insurance industry faces a critical juncture,” said Dr. Jaclyn de Medicci Bruneau, Director of Insurance at Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets and lead author of the report.  “Broad participation in climate disclosure has not been translated into the rigorous, decision-useful data that regulators, investors, and policyholders urgently need. As climate-related financial risks accelerate and the protection gap widens, insurers must shift from describing these risks to quantifying them.” 

Key findings from the report: 

• 83.2% of insurers now address all four TCFD pillars, yet only 10.5% of individual datapoints assessed across those pillars have achieved 'fully met' status. 

• Metrics and Targets is the most critically underdeveloped pillar, with 81.9% of datapoints rated 'not found.' This includes near-complete absence of indirect emissions reporting, virtually no internal carbon pricing, and failure by most carriers to quantify the share of assets subject to material physical risk. 

• 51.7% of all assessed datapoints were rated 'not found,' and 37% were rated 'partially met'—meaning fewer than one in nine disclosures meets TCFD's substantive requirements. 

• Despite the increase in extreme weather events, pillar-level quality scores have remained essentially frozen for four years: Risk Management, the strongest pillar, has hovered between 25.6% and 27.2% 'fully met'; Metrics and Targets, the weakest, has fluctuated between 7.9% and 8.5%. 

• 91% of carriers received a 'not found' rating specifically on indirect emissions disclosure—even though indirect emissions typically represent over 90% of an insurer's total carbon footprint. 

• Climate-linked executive compensation remains virtually nonexistent, with only 8.5% 'fully met' and 66% 'not found' across the governance pillar. 

• Six carriers, American Alternative Insurance Corporation, American Guaranty & Liability Insurance Corporation, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions America Insurance Corporation, Greenwich Insurance Company, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance Co., Ltd., and HDI Global Insurance Company—achieved 50%–57% 'fully met' across all datapoints, demonstrating that comprehensive disclosure is achievable. 

(Editor's note: The measurements above reflect the presence and quality of reporting on each area. They do not indicate that disclosures rated 'fully met' are comprehensive in all respects). 

This report arrives as climate-related financial pressures on the insurance sector reach historic levels. In 2025, global natural catastrophe losses reached unprecedented levels, including wildfire and storm events that strained insurer balance sheets across multiple markets. The gap between economic losses and insured coverage continues to widen, and in the U.S., an estimated 8% of homeowners now forgo insurance entirely due to affordability, leaving $1.6 trillion in unprotected assets. 

The 2026 report includes a new interactive dashboard allowing regulators, investors, and other stakeholders to filter results by carrier, TCFD pillar, line of business, NAIC zone, and individual datapoints across all four years of data. View the dashboard HERE.  

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About the Ceres Accelerator 

The Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets is a center within Ceres that aims to improve the practices and policies that govern capital markets by engaging federal and state regulators, financial institutions, investors, and corporate boards to act on climate risk as a systemic financial risk. For more information, visit ceres.org/accelerator.