Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, closed the first half of 2026 with 44 billion dollars in insured losses from natural catastrophes worldwide, a figure the company itself describes as moderate against the average of the last decade. Inside that cold accounting sits a hierarchy rarely named aloud. A wildfire in Los Angeles translates into an exact number, zip code by zip code, forty billion dollars according to Swiss Re, the largest insured wildfire loss in history. A wildfire in the Colombian Amazon translates into no number at all, because the land burning there never had a registered owner able to buy a policy in the first place. The same global eye that prices one does not see the other, and that selective blindness is not a glitch in the system, it is the system working exactly as designed.
Fire is not a local anomaly this year. Greece evacuated entire villages near Athens while two megafires scorched more than 16,000 hectares in a single week. Chile buried 21 people in January, after flames tore through 45,000 hectares in the Biobío and Ñuble regions and forced 50,000 people to evacuate. Globally, the first four months of 2026 already added up to more than 150 million hectares burned, 20 percent above the previous record, with Africa and Asia driving most of the increase. None of these numbers need exaggeration to be alarming. What this piece asks is not how much burned, but who decides, among all those hectares, which ones count as a loss and which simply vanish without leaving a record.
The eye that calculates
The mechanism is simple, as every well built extraction mechanism tends to be. Munich Re and Swiss Re do not improvise their figures, they build them from models that cross temperature, soil moisture, vegetation density and cadastral value, down to a price per parcel. In California that exercise already has visible results. State Farm stopped writing new homeowner policies in the state, Allstate did the same, and State Farm failed to renew roughly 72,000 policies in the highest risk zip codes. When the January 2025 Los Angeles fires devastated Pacific Palisades and Eaton, the FAIR Plan, the state insurer of last resort that absorbs whoever the private market has already turned away, had to levy a billion dollars on member insurers to cover losses nearing four billion. Nobody was surprised by that number. It had already been calculated, months earlier, by an algorithm running quietly in an office thousands of kilometres away from the smoke.
The same actuarial software had already run identical exercises in Australia during the 2019 and 2020 fire season, and in Canada in 2023, two countries with digitised land registries, a mature insurance market and decades of complete property records. In neither case did the reinsurer need to invent a new methodology, only apply the same model to a registry that already existed. Precision does not depend on the size of the fire, it depends on the prior existence of a file stating how much each hectare is worth and who legally owns it.
Munich Re has already warned that the second half of 2026 carries an added risk, El Niño is pushing drought and fire across Australia, Central America and southern Africa, while Europe faces a summer of extreme heat. The company says so in a technical statement, with no rhetorical urgency, the way one announces the weather. It is the same coldness with which it priced a Los Angeles neighbourhood down to the last dollar two years earlier.
France decides not to see a catastrophe
France did not need a panicking market to reach a comparable outcome. The country had already burned nearly 98,000 hectares by 28 July 2026, according to the Interior Minister himself, Laurent Nuñez, while other satellite measurements already put the figure at 115,000 hectares covered by fire on the same date. The previous absolute record, 66,000 hectares across the whole of 2022, was shattered within days. Three successive heatwaves in May, June and July, on top of a drought authorities already call historic, left the Landes region with more than 42,000 hectares reduced to ash.
France had burned nearly 98,000 hectares by 28 July 2026, a historic record that shattered the previous ceiling of 66,000 hectares set in 2022 within a matter of days, according to the French Interior Ministry.
And yet wildfire does not appear among the risks covered by the CatNat regime, the public mechanism that compensates natural catastrophes in France. The 1982 law that created the regime, expanded in 2021 to include risks classified as uninsurable, deliberately left fire out, because the state classifies it as an ordinary risk, covered by the standard fire clause of any home insurance policy, not as a catastrophe deserving national solidarity. It is the same actuarial logic Munich Re applies after counting the dead and the hectares, only applied in advance, with no insurer needing to panic or pull out of anything. The state had already decided, before a single tree caught fire, that this particular blaze does not count.
The law of 10 July 2023 added another quiet layer. It made the sale of a wooded plot conditional on compliance with brush clearing obligations, and in the red zones of wildfire risk prevention plans, identical reconstruction of a destroyed home can be refused or conditioned so strictly that it amounts to a refusal in practice. Nobody needs to tell a landowner that their land is now worthless. The law tells them without ever saying that sentence, and no official ever has to sign their name under such a blunt statement.
The practical result is a silent geography of red zones where property keeps existing on paper while ceasing to have any usable purpose. Nobody expropriates, nobody buys at a discount, nobody needs to show up as an interested buyer. The law simply freezes the land in a state of empty ownership, with no rebuildable legal use, until the original owner grows tired and walks away on their own. It is a form of dispossession requiring neither violence nor a transaction, only time and administrative patience.
The Amazon where nothing is written down
In the Colombian Amazon the mechanism runs entirely in reverse, and that is exactly where Munich’s eye stops seeing. The Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development documented the loss of 788,313 hectares of Amazonian forest between 2016 and 2023, of which 545,000 corresponded to tierras baldías, land that in theory belongs to the Nation but that Colombia never systematically inventoried or titled throughout its entire republican history. In the sixteen municipalities that make up the Amazon Deforestation Arc alone, 505,000 hectares of natural forest were converted into pasture between 2018 and 2022, opened up by 19,000 kilometres of illegal roads built to sustain that advance.
The demobilisation of the FARC in 2016 did not close that gap, it made it more visible. Territory once controlled by the guerrilla as a de facto authority, with its own rules on who could clear land and who could not, was left open to settlers, ranchers and armed dissident factions, with the Colombian state never arriving in time with a land registry, a title, or even a minimal institutional presence. Ideam and international organisations such as the International Crisis Group have documented that pattern, the end of a conflict did not automatically bring the legal order attributed to it, it opened a new race to occupy land that the previous conflict had, paradoxically, kept less accessible.
According to FCDS, fire is the main instrument used to seize deforested tierras baldías belonging to the Nation in order to establish cattle ranches in the Colombian Amazon.
Ideam identified praderización, the systematic conversion of forest into pasture to consolidate possession of stolen land, as the leading cause of Amazonian deforestation, ahead of illicit crops or mining. La Silla Vacía has documented that those seizing this land are not impoverished settlers but people with capital accumulated in cities, who treat praderización as an investment vehicle rather than a means of subsistence. Cattle, in a good share of these cases, is little more than a pretext, the expansion of pastureland tracks land speculation itself far more closely than actual ranching, and in the critical zones of the deforestation arc up to eighty percent of what is cleared ends up as illegal pasture without any real ranching activity behind it. The Amazon now accounts for between sixty and sixty eight percent of the country’s total deforestation, more than 300,000 hectares lost in the last four years alone.
No reinsurer needs to withdraw from this market because this market, in the sense Munich Re recognises, does not exist. There is no policy to cancel where none was ever issued. Fire there is not competing against an actuarial calculation, it is competing against a cadastral void the Colombian state has carried since its founding, and in that void it is always whoever arrives first with a chainsaw and a herd who wins, long before any notary or any bank ever hears about the parcel.
What one eye sees and does not see
The three scenes share a single fire, the same extreme heat season driven by climate change, yet they produce three distinct forms of dispossession depending on the degree of institutional visibility of each territory. In California the market sees with total precision and withdraws, leaving behind a perfectly documented accounting trail, zip codes, dollar figures, press releases. In France the state gets ahead of the market and decides by law that certain risks do not count as catastrophes, which lets it manage abandonment without any insurer having to carry the public blame for a cancellation. In the Colombian Amazon there is neither a market nor a law to classify, because there is no prior registry to start from, and that void is not neutral, it is the very condition that lets fire function as a de facto title deed.
The difference between the three scenes is not climatic, all three share the same overheated summer. The difference is who ends up on the right side of the record. In California, whoever held a mortgage and a recognised mailing address lost coverage but kept, at least, a file proving what they had. In France, whoever held a legal title kept that piece of paper even after the land stopped being of any use. In the Colombian Amazon, whoever never held any paper at all loses neither coverage nor resale value, they lose outright the ability to prove, before any future institution, court or buyer, that this land was ever theirs to begin with.
Munich Re’s own warning for the second half of 2026 names Australia, Central America and southern Africa as the next risk zones because of El Niño. These are, for the most part, geographies carrying the same structural problem as the Colombian Amazon, incomplete land registries, informal or nonexistent titles, rural populations no actuary in Munich will ever be able to price because there is no file to start from. The reinsurer already knows, in climatic terms, where the next fire will burn. What it does not know, and cannot know with its own tools, is who owns the land that is about to burn.
Munich Re will keep publishing its figures every half year, always higher, always better calculated. That calculation will keep being exact exactly where power already wrote its name on the land, and will keep being blind exactly where that same power decided, generations ago, to write nothing down at all…
G.S.
Sources
- Insured losses from nat cats reached $44bn in H1’26, Munich Re
- Swiss Re estima que las catástrofes naturales costarán a las aseguradoras al menos 148.000 millones en 2026
- Thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by their insurers before the Palisades Fire
- Près de 98 000 hectares détruits par des incendies en France depuis le début 2026, un “record historique”
- 115.000 ha parcourus, France, incendies monstres et canicule
- Incendies en France, pourquoi le régime CatNat ne les indemnise pas comme catastrophes naturelles
- LOI n° 2023-580 du 10 juillet 2023 visant à renforcer la prévention et la lutte contre l’intensification et l’extension du risque incendie
- Ganadería en la Amazonía colombiana, impacto en la deforestación y crecimiento de hatos, FCDS
- La campaña deja en segundo plano los mercados que destruyen el bosque, La Silla Vacía
