Solution: Co-design new innovative insurance products with insurers, public sector actors, and climate adaptation experts to close Europe's climate protection gap, tested across diverse pilot regions and hazards.

Key challenge: Only a quarter of climate catastrophe losses in Europe are insured leaving households, communities, and public sector actors deeply exposed without adequate risk transfer mechanisms.

Context: Between 1980 and 2022, an estimated €650 billion in assets were lost due to weather and climate-related incidents in the EU, yet the majority were uninsured. The SOTERIA project, funded under Horizon Europe with over €12 million and 32 partners, ran from 2022 to February 2026 to address this protection gap across urban, peri-urban, and rural European pilot regions.

Solution in practice: SOTERIA co-designed innovative non-life insurance products across seven pilot regions: Trøndelag (Norway), West Athens (Greece), Valencia (Spain), Bavaria and Saxony-Anhalt (Germany), Gabrovo (Bulgaria), and Zadar (Croatia). Each pilot addressed local hazard profiles through tailored approaches. The project concluded with a published Replication Manual for the Regional Adaptation Support Tool (RAST) consolidating its methodology, tools, templates, and case study examples.

Impact / outcome: Insurance products co-designed in seven pilot regions; Regional Adaptation Support Tool replication manual published. Next steps The SOTERIA Replication Manual provides a ready-made methodology to apply the RAST for a coalition to support replication of community-scale climate insurance product design in additional geographies.

Next steps: Could include piloting the SOTERIA co-design methodology in non-European markets and advocating for regulatory frameworks that support multi-actor community-scale insurance product development.

Organizations involved:

Authoring: SOTERIA project consortium; Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3)

Actors: European Commission (Horizon Europe)

Implementation partners: Insurers; Local Governments; Regulators & Policymakers; Civil Society Organizations; Data Providers