How do we make more of the world insurable and unlock capital that wouldn’t otherwise flow? That question drives the work of Irina Waltz, Strategy and Technology Director at Aon, who recently spoke with Linda-Eling Lee, the MSCI Institute’s founding director.

To Irina, the stakes are clear: global economic losses from natural catastrophes and extreme weather have surpassed $300 billion in nine of the past 10 years, and a significant share of that remains uninsured. For her, the industry’s role goes well beyond compensating for damage. “Insurance at its best doesn’t just transfer risk,” she says, “it enables possibility.”

That conviction shapes her work on infrastructure. With roughly $106 trillion of investment needed globally by 2040, a recent report by Aon and World Bank Group institutions examines how new projects can be built to stay insurable over their lifetime: engaging underwriters and brokers earlier in the project cycle, and embedding forward-looking climate risk into how assets are sited, designed and operated. “Insurability,” she notes, “often equals bankability.”

The same logic applies to insurers themselves. Waltz maps the industry along a climate resilience maturity curve, from compliance adherents to agents of change, and urges firms to move along it “with urgency and intention.” The bigger shift is one of mindset: seeing climate risk “not only as a threat to manage, but as an opportunity to reimagine what insurance is for.”