What Nordic Risk Managers Should Focus on in 2026

Looking back to look ahead

While 2025 may have felt calmer than 2024, the Nordics should not interpret this as a return to stability. Insured natural catastrophe losses once again exceeded USD 100bn globally, marking the sixth consecutive year at this level, driven by floods, severe storms and wildfires. This matters for Nordic companies because the region is becoming increasingly exposed to unusual patterns of heavy rainfall, winter storms and localized flooding.

Geopolitically, Nordic businesses remain closely connected to global trade routes and suppliers. With the global risk picture becoming more volatile, supply chain resilience has become a board‑level priority across Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

At the same time, AI continues to advance at speed, transforming both how attacks are executed and how defenses must be designed. Many Nordic boards report that this rapid development makes long‑term planning more challenging than ever.

The global insurance protection gap and why it matters in the Nordics

The protection gap continues to be a global concern. In 2025, only around half of global catastrophe losses were insured, and the gap is even wider for cyber-related losses. At the same time, global cyber premiums remain small compared with rapidly rising incident costs, an imbalance that is especially relevant for Nordic organizations, given their high levels of digitalization and dependence on cloud services. This increases the risk of operational disruption and financial impact if key suppliers or SaaS platforms experience cyber events.

For Nordic companies, closing the protection gap means strengthening pre‑loss mitigation and ensuring that business continuity plans are both robust and regularly tested.

Climate: resilience in an era of shifting local risks

Non‑peak perils dominated 2025 losses, and many of these are highly relevant for the Nordic region. Winters are becoming more unpredictable, with storms, heavy snowfall and ice placing strain on transportation networks and energy grids. Summers are also showing greater variability, with sharp temperature swings and irregular rainfall patterns. Europe’s record heat in 2024 and widespread flooding underline how climate shifts are moving northward, making traditional assumptions about local weather patterns less reliable.
 

What this means for Nordic risk managers in 2026
• Treat all types of high-water events in your global operation as relevant, including pluvial flooding in urban areas and along infrastructure corridors. 
• Plan for volatility regardless of seasonal forecasts, and continue investing in resilience, redundancy and rapid-recovery options. 

• Ask your team: are our crisis plans prepared for flash floods or extreme rainfall at sites we have historically considered low‑risk?

Geopolitical risk and Nordic exposure

Globalization has long benefited Nordic economies through strong export markets, integrated supply chains and access to global talent. Today, those same connections amplify the impact of geopolitical shocks. Disruptions around the Red Sea and Suez Canal, rising trade tensions and tightening security environments all have direct consequences for Nordic importers and exporters.

Interconnectivity is increasingly critical: cyber vulnerabilities, geopolitical tensions and operational risks often overlap. For Nordic organizations with concentrated manufacturing, specialized suppliers or long logistics routes, a disruption occurring thousands of kilometers away can quickly cascade into production delays, cash‑flow pressures and missed delivery commitments.

Questions for your team 
• How current are our geopolitical assumptions, and have we mapped which operations depend on vulnerable supply routes or offshore service providers? 
• Do we assess risks individually, or do we actively evaluate how cyber, climate and geopolitical factors could interact and amplify one another?

Actions for 2026 
• Map multi-tier suppliers and logistics dependencies, especially links to Europe and Asia. Identify feasible alternate routes or nearshore options. 
• Align enterprise risk scenarios with global trends and stress-test combined scenarios such as cyber-driven operational outages during a logistics disruption. 

Cyber risk: changing fast and highly relevant for Nordic businesses

AI is now central to both cyberattack methods and cyber defense, accelerating the speed and sophistication of threats. Nordic organizations, known for high digital maturity and extensive cloud adoption, face rising exposure to AI‑enabled phishing, deepfake‑driven fraud and rapid exploitation of system vulnerabilities.

Many companies in the region also rely heavily on international SaaS providers, making third‑party outages a significant operational risk.

At the same time, supply chain cyber incidents continue to increase, and ransomware tactics are evolving with more data theft and higher extortion demands. Privacy regulations in the Nordics and across the EU are tightening as well, raising the regulatory and litigation consequences when personal data is compromised.

Questions for your team 
• Does our definition of cyber risk cover AI-related threats, model governance issues and data-quality risks? 
• Do our SaaS and supplier agreements enable rapid identity‑ and access‑recovery if systems fail or accounts are compromised?

Priorities for 2026 
• Strengthen defenses against AI enabled phishing and vulnerability exploitation. 
• Conduct tabletop exercises tailored to Nordic conditions, such as cyber events combined with winter storms, power-grid strain or port delays. 
• Review cyber insurance and privacy coverage to ensure alignment with evolving EU and Nordic regulatory expectations. 

2026 checklist for Nordic risk leaders

1. Integrate interconnectivity. Add climate, supply chain and cyber dependencies into your risk register and assess the criticality of key suppliers and sites.
2. Rebalance climate programmes. Include pluvial flooding, storm surge, heat waves and wildfire exposure.
3. Strengthen logistics planning. Prepare alternate transport routes and suppliers. Monitor key chokepoints affecting Nordic trade.
4. Modernize cyber governance. Include AI oversight, tighten vendor controls and ensure rapid recovery capabilities for identity and access systems.
5. Work to close the protection gap. Use mitigation measures, parametric and partnerships to reduce uninsured exposure across Nordic and international operations. 

Meeting tomorrow prepared

For Nordic companies, the challenge going into 2026 is not identifying risks but understanding how they are connected. When climate volatility, cyber threats and geopolitical uncertainty overlap, small weaknesses can escalate quickly. Seeing the full picture can make businesses more resilient, more adaptive and better positioned to grow. Even in an unpredictable environment.