1 in 2 people worried about insurance affordability as risk of climate disasters grows - poll

Half of people worry they will not be able to afford house insurance as the risk of climate-driven natural disasters grows, an annual poll shows.

And despite growing awareness of climate change, a dwindling number of people think either the government or the country as a whole is doing a good job of tackling it.

Insurance underwriter IAG, which has published its 2026 climate poll, said the results reflected a growing sense that New Zealand was good at responding in emergencies but not at proactively reducing risk.

The poll of 1000 people, which IAG has undertaken every year since 2018, found that more than 90 percent of respondents now expect more frequent and severe weather-related disasters in future.

Many of them felt that growing risk was affecting affordability, with 69 percent of those surveyed saying they believed it was driving premium increases.

Overall, four out of five people said insurance was becoming less affordable and half worried about their abillity to keep paying.

The most recent monitoring data published by Treasury showed average premiums increased by a third between October 2022 and October 2025.

Some experts have warned that insurance will become prohibitively expensive or impossible to get at all for some properties in future.

IAG spokesperson Bryce Davies said more people were worried about losing access to insurance "than perhaps need to be".

"There's some work that we need to do as an industry to kind of calm some people about where we're heading."

But people were right to want transparency from their insurer, he said.

"They want to know, well, what is my premium made up of, and are you going to insure me in the future? And I think that's a really legitimate thing to ask insurers to do."

The results of the survey showed growing pessimism that New Zealand was capable of addressing climate change,with less than a third of people saying the country's response was on the right track.

Since 2018, the proportion of people who believed the government shouldered the biggest responsibility for addressing climate change had more than doubled, from 25 to 58 percent of respondents.

"People are seeing the scale of it, the frequency of it, and how big it is ... and perhaps are concluding that the only people who really can get their arms around this is the government, because it's national problem," Davies said.

At the same time, their faith in government to tackle the problem had dwindled, with only 21 percent saying its action on the issue was good.

Davies said the survey results reflected a lack of meaningful action even as severe events became more frequent.

"That's sitting in their mind, that all this is actually happening and this is getting worse, and they are not seeing a commensurate kind of response to that."

People were not always seeing practical action in their community, and also were sometimes unsure of what they should be doing themselves, he said.

"We're very good as a country at responding to these events, emergency management swings into action, we see it on the news, but that's all we see.

"There's not a conversation going on in New Zealand about being resilient."

Many of the actions people supported were practical ones.

Between 70 and 80 percent of respondents supported measures that included limiting development in high-risk areas, stronger zoning and planning rules, and protecting infrastructure and natural defences like wetlands.

The government has said that its planning reforms would form part of the solution, together with a yet-to-be-drafted law change that would require councils to create adaptation plans for areas at high risk from natural hazards.

In a report it published at the start of this month, IAG slammed the government's approach to climate adaptation to date as "adhoc and piecemeal".

Chief executive Phil Gibson said this year's poll showed New Zealanders wanted stronger government leadership.

"The challenge we face is not insurmountable," he said.

"It requires a clear strategy and senior political leadership to drive the change needed so that councils, businesses and households can get on and reduce the climate risks they face."