Swiss Re chief executive Andreas Berger has warned that the threat posed by extreme heat to human life remains underestimated, placing greater attention on the mortality and health consequences of Europe’s increasingly severe summer temperatures.
Berger said: “The risk of heatwaves and the associated fatalities was underestimated,” adding: “We need to raise awareness of the dangers arising from this.”
His warning follows another period of intense heat across the continent, with excess deaths concentrated particularly among older people. Germany’s Robert Koch Institute estimated that around 11,900 heat related deaths had occurred in the country by late July, much of the mortality associated with extreme temperatures during late June.
France and Spain have also experienced particularly high temperatures, while drought and low river levels have disrupted transport and industrial activity. Europe is now recognised as the fastest warming continent, making sustained heat a more regular component of physical climate risk.
Berger’s comments came shortly after Swiss Re reported first-half net income of $2.8bn, an increase of 9% year on year. Return on equity reached 22.7%, while the group remains on course towards its $4.5bn full-year profit target.
Life and Health Reinsurance generated approximately $1bn of net income during the first six months, up 21% from the prior-year period. Swiss Re attributed the performance to healthy margins across its existing book and favourable US mortality experience. Berger said it was still too early to determine definitively how Europe’s excess heat mortality would affect the group’s financial figures.
Heat produces a different risk pattern from a major hurricane, flood, or earthquake. The consequences are distributed across deaths, periods of illness, health system pressure, lower productivity, energy demand, transport disruption, agriculture, and infrastructure rather than concentrated in a single insured event.
Such dispersed losses can be harder to see in aggregate even when their economic effect is substantial. Europe’s latest heat and drought conditions have already put pressure on freight networks, river transport, power systems, and supply chains. Berger’s comments add direct mortality, workforce health, and life insurance exposure to that operating picture.
Life and health insurers build pricing and reserving assumptions from expected mortality and morbidity, using historic experience adjusted for changing demographics and medical trends. Persistent changes in the frequency, duration, geography, and intensity of extreme heat complicate those models, particularly where populations are ageing or urban environments amplify temperatures.
Age profile is only one variable. Housing quality, access to cooling, urban density, air pollution, occupational exposure, healthcare capacity, and the timing of heat events can all influence mortality. A prolonged period of unusually high night-time temperatures can be particularly dangerous because people have less opportunity to recover physiologically between hot days.
Employment exposure is similarly uneven. Construction, logistics, agriculture, utilities, infrastructure, and other outdoor occupations face the most obvious physical hazards, although poorly cooled indoor workplaces can also create health and productivity problems. Fatigue, dehydration, disrupted sleep, and travel disruption can increase absence while reducing the effectiveness of employees who remain at work.
Adaptation therefore increasingly sits inside normal operating decisions. Changes to working hours, building cooling, ventilation, heat protocols, water provision, emergency response, employee communications, and business continuity planning can reduce exposure even where the underlying temperature trend cannot be controlled locally.
Insurance modelling will have to adapt alongside those measures. More granular data on local temperature, building conditions, population vulnerability, age profiles, and behavioural responses can improve assessments, but historical relationships become less reliable when conditions begin to exceed previous ranges.
Climate adaptation also creates a different management problem from emissions reduction. A company may have a credible long-term decarbonisation plan and still be inadequately prepared for a severe heatwave next summer. Physical resilience depends on immediate decisions over buildings, working practices, logistics, insurance, and contingency planning rather than solely on future emissions targets.
Swiss Re’s half-year numbers show how a strong immediate financial performance can coexist with a more difficult underlying risk trajectory. Property and Casualty Reinsurance recorded $1.4bn of net income, up 18%, helped by relatively low large natural catastrophe losses in the first half. Corporate Solutions also increased net income by 14% to $490m.
Strong capital generation gives insurers greater capacity to absorb volatility, but it does not remove the need to reassess emerging exposures. If heat related mortality becomes more frequent, assumptions across life, health, employee benefits, and other protection products may need to change, while employers face parallel pressure to improve workplace resilience.
Europe’s warming climate is consequently altering several risk systems at once. The same period of extreme heat can affect employee health, mortality, power demand, transport, industrial output, and insurance claims, while the absence of one catastrophic event can make the combined economic cost less visible.
Berger’s warning puts the human cost at the centre of that calculation. Insurers, employers, and governments have increasingly sophisticated data on physical climate hazards, yet the scale of mortality associated with prolonged heat suggests that existing assumptions about exposure and preparedness remain incomplete.
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