Overview
Has the threat of European windstorms permanently diminished, or does this represent a false sense of security? Cotality dug into the underlying data behind recent storms, historical near-misses, and future climate projections and saw that European windstorm risk is indeed a primary concern, both locally for the people who call the continent home and globally to the companies that protect property financially.
So, what’s really happened? This recent dip in financial impact from European windstorms is largely due to luck; storm tracks avoiding centers of population and economic activity. A stroke of luck that may not hold when the next major event occurs.
The 2025-2026 season: A decisive wake-up call
The 2025-2026 season witnessed a sequence of damaging storms that tested the resilience of communities across southwestern Europe. Storm Nils swept into southwest France. It was the most damaging storm to hit the region since 2009, bringing ferocious wind gusts of up to 98 mph, cutting power to 850,000 homes, and severely disrupting critical transportation infrastructure. Initial estimates suggest this single storm caused insured losses between €800 million and €1.2 billion in France alone. The wider impact to the economy will be much greater as not all homeowners and businesses have adequate insurance cover.
Storm Kristin battered the Iberian Peninsula, packing record-breaking gusts of 130 mph in Portugal. Widely regarded by the public as the worst storm to hit Portugal in modern history, Kristin caused massive devastation that prompted the government to allocate €4 billion to cover damages across multiple sectors. In terms of losses to the insurance industry, Storm Kristin was the region's most damaging wind event since 2018. Cotality estimated that Storm Kristin generated insured losses of between €300 million and €450 million.
The Portuguese wind storm was also part of a rapid-fire sequence of storms, including Harry, Ingrid, Joseph, Leonardo, and Marta, that plagued the region in late January and early February of this year. When storms cluster together like that, the losses can add up quickly.
The hidden history of volatility
It is dangerous to assume that recent historical losses are a perfect predictor of future risk. Why? The slightest change in a storm's location, orientation, or track can transform a manageable event into an industry-altering loss.
Counterfactual analysis can visualize this. At Cotality, we simulate thousands of slightly different versions of actual historical storms where each simulated version is just as realistic, meteorologically, as the historical event. The pattern in the losses reveals a hidden history of volatility.
Looking at a counterfactual analysis of Storm Friederike in 2018 reveals that if the storm's track had shifted southward by just 200 kilometers over more densely populated areas, and its winds had been slightly stronger, the losses would have equaled those of the catastrophic Storm Kyrill from 2007.
A shifting map of risk
As global environments shift, the geographic map of European windstorm risk is expected to shift. By the end of the century, storm tracks are anticipated to increase over Northwest Europe, including the UK and the North Sea, while regions like Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula may see a decrease. This means that the strongest storms could shift directly over some of the most critical, high-value areas of property in Western Europe.
Additionally, while the overall absolute number of storms in the Northern Hemisphere might decline slightly due to warming in the Arctic, the extreme storms that do form could be much more dangerous. Models indicate that the frequency of extreme, catastrophic events — storms with the devastating severity of 1990’s Storm Daria — could potentially triple under certain warming scenarios.
Securing future resilience
European windstorms are a complex, ever-present threat, and they demand attention. The financial impact of the 2025-2026 season, the results of counterfactual analyses, and the potential impact of climate change demonstrates that readiness requires foresight. The absence of a major windstorm event in France, Germany, or the UK in recent years may have created a false sense of security. However, the underlying risk remains.
