This report examines economic and insured costs of natural disasters due to extreme weather and the role of public sector insurance mechanisms to encourage risk reduction and resilience building. The economic and insured costs of natural disasters due to extreme weather – tropical cyclones, floods, bushfires and storms – are rising in concert with growing concentrations of population and wealth in disaster-prone regions. A contribution to these rising costs has not yet been attributed to anthropogenic climate change, although such a contribution cannot be ruled out. This finding is in accord with the IPCC SREX report (2012).