Insuring tomorrow: The ten emerging risks on our watchlist

At this year’s Exceedance, our theme is ‘Insights Amplified’—and there’s a clear reason why we chose it.

Everyone in the insurance industry aims to minimize surprises, avoid being caught off-guard, and gain the insight and foresight needed to mitigate overexposure.

If your business is on a quest for insights to help improve risk decision-making, strategy, and planning, your "risk radar" is constantly engaged, with teams across your organization mobilized to gather and interpret risk insights.

You may be tracking your established peril types, business lines, and regions on your radar, and the immediate factors that influence them. What’s more difficult is spotting new and emerging risks or questioning whether a familiar risk needs to be viewed in a new way. It’s not just about identifying risks.

Once you have a list of potential exposures, the challenge is deciding which are relevant to your business. And for relevant risks, can you amplify the risk signal and pick out the risk from the noise, so you can understand and ultimately integrate the risk insights into your business?

Introducing ten emerging risks on our watchlist

To spark thought and discussion, we have asked subject matter experts across our business which risks should be on your watchlist. These ten risks are in no particular order and reflect either new, emerging risks or trends for established risks, each with significant loss potential.

At Exceedance 2025 in Nashville, I shared this list of ten risks with our attendees. Below is a brief overview, with each risk highlighted in bold:

• A move to the coast, mountains, or forests is becoming harder to justify as the rising cost of paradise sees aging Florida condos to Blue Ridge Mountain retreats buffeted by cat events and rising repair costs.
• Earthquake-resilient tower blocks tumbled in southeast Turkey in 2024, raising the question of high-risk high-rises, where poor construction, regulations, and maintenance increase the exposure.
• During 2024 and now in 2025, wildfires are a West Coast and an East Coast problem, as wandering wildfire season durations are expanding across North America, and cities and regions once largely immune are now experiencing regular fires. And, from Valencia to dry, desert Dubai, once-in-a-century fast floods now happen regularly, with global infrastructure unprepared for extreme rainfall events.
• Is working with nature our best defense, as research shows how mangroves, reefs, and salt marshes are proven in reducing wave energy and height, or can tree planting help cool urban heat islands?
• Although the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was only five years ago, is the vigilance against viral threats fading? H5N1 bird flu has spread from wild birds to poultry, cattle, and humans. Does it have pandemic potential?
• Since COVID-19, global supply chain breakdowns are in the spotlight, whether natural disasters such as the 2011 Thai floods, geopolitical conflicts, or chokepoints like the Suez and Panama canals, business (and insurance) losses can easily cascade.
• Our colleagues at Praedicat highlight two emerging liability risks. First, it is a case of chemicals forever with PFAS. Renowned for their durability but highly resistant to degradation, PFAS chemicals have infiltrated our water, soil, and food. Links to bodily harm see litigation surging and regulatory scrutiny tightening.
• And microplastics are everywhere—inside our food, water, and air, humans are ingesting and accumulating microplastics per year, as growing evidence of serious health impacts and the potential for mass tort litigation looms.
• Finally, the CrowdStrike update error in 2024 saw a cascade of millions of Windows computers rendered unusable, gathering clouds around the major cloud computing providers, who were also caught up in the rogue update.

To explore these risks in depth, our Moody’s data visualization team has brought the data to life in an interactive experience, encouraging you to dig deeper and explore more. Click here to access the data story.