I still think about Cyclone Eline back in 2000.
What stuck with me wasn’t just how strong the storm was. It was everything that came after. Homes wrecked. Businesses shut down. Infrastructure gone. People’s livelihoods hanging by a thread for months. That’s when it hit me: you can’t wait for the disaster to start thinking about risk.
Now we’re staring down a strong El Niño building through 2026, possibly running into early 2027. Southern Africa is right in the danger zone for drought and serious heat this summer. And I keep seeing the same mistake happening again — we treat insurance like something you only think about once the damage is done.
Here’s the thing about El Niño: it doesn’t just hit one sector. Drought hits farms, water supply, livestock, even power generation. Heat and dry spells drive up fire risk. Water shortages slow down factories and businesses. And all of it ripples into claims across property, motor, agriculture, business interruption, transport — the lot.
We tend to look at these as separate, unrelated claims. A farmer loses a crop. A trucking company loses volume. A factory’s costs spike. A warehouse burns. But zoom out and it’s not five unrelated stories — it’s one regional risk playing out in five different ways.
This is exactly why brokers matter right now. Our job can’t just be “here’s your renewal, premium’s up, done.” If the risk landscape is shifting, our conversations with clients need to shift too.
So I’ve been asking clients harder questions. If your water gets cut for two weeks, what happens to your business? If your supplier can’t deliver, then what? Is your business interruption cover actually enough, or is it based on numbers from three years ago? Farmers can’t control the rain, but they can control irrigation, water storage, firebreaks, contingency plans — insurance should back that up, not replace it.
Property owners, same story. Clearing vegetation, checking your roof and gutters, servicing your electrics, keeping fire equipment ready — cheap stuff compared to rebuilding from scratch. Fleet and logistics clients need to be rethinking routes, maintenance schedules and driver protocols too, because heat and bad roads don’t play nice with tight delivery schedules.
On the insurer side, I think we need to stop underwriting purely off history. The question can’t just be “what’s happened here before” — it has to be “what could happen here if the climate keeps shifting.” That might mean leaning harder into geographic risk data, revisiting deductibles, or looking at parametric cover for things like drought, where a fast payout tied to a clear weather trigger beats waiting months for a traditional claims process.
But let’s be honest about what insurance can and can’t do. It can’t fill a dry dam. It can’t bring back a lost harvest. It can’t fix a washed-out road overnight. What it can do is catch you when your own risk management gets overwhelmed. That’s the whole point of it.
And I get why people cut back on cover when money’s tight — insurance is often the first thing to go. But cutting cover without understanding what you’re giving up can turn a bad year into a business-ending one. So instead of just telling people to “buy more insurance,” I’d rather sit down and actually walk through what’s covered, what’s excluded, what the limits are, and whether the sum insured still makes sense today.
El Niño is a real problem. But it’s also a chance to stop being reactive. Insurers can invest in better modelling and early warning systems. Brokers can actually dig into annual reviews instead of rubber-stamping them. Clients can put real prevention measures in place. None of us can control the weather. But we can absolutely control how ready we are for it.
The question I keep coming back to isn’t “how much will this cost us.” It’s “what are we doing today so that when this hits, our clients and our business can actually take it.”
That’s what I think good insurance is supposed to do — not just pay out after the storm, but help people be ready before it.
By Will Maunga