SRCC Risk: Modelling the Rising Tide of Civil Unrest

13 March 2026 / 3 min read

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The risk of strikes, riots, and civil commotion (SRCC) has come to the forefront for insurers and reinsurers since 2019. Since then, five major SRCC events generated more than $10 billion in combined insured losses. And in 2025, riots that affected commercial or municipal property were twice as common globally as in 2022.

Dozens of countries around the world now face intersecting political, economic, and social factors that make them more prone to violent unrest, leading to damage and business interruption claims. Verisk’s analysis found that over 12,000 commercial or municipal properties were affected by riots in 2025, a 20% increase from 2023 and 2024, each of which had their own major SRCC event.

About 100 countries experience riots each year that damage commercial or municipal property. With books of business covering SRCC and political violence often having a global footprint, insurers are understandably paying more attention to this hazard.

Mastering complex dynamics

In times of heightened uncertainty and a seemingly endless stream of geopolitical events, one can be forgiven for seeing political violence as a complex hazard that is impossible to manage. It’s important to bear in mind that political violence spans multiple, distinct types of events with different actors, means, and paths to insured losses. For example, terrorism and conflict may result in an insured asset being destroyed or damaged, but the drivers for potential events and the risk faced by each exposure can vary significantly given its location. It’s possible to measure those drivers and develop transparent, validated, and comprehensive models to inform insurers’ underwriting and exposure management decisions.

While it’s important to draw on the established approaches to modelling natural catastrophes, as a human-driven issue, SRCC presents unique challenges:

It may be easy to identify the large loss events of recent years, but that information isn’t nearly enough to support a robust framework for assessing future SRCC insured losses.
SRCC events have intrinsically complex dynamics - from the underlying conditions that make a country more susceptible to rioting, to the triggers for unrest, and finally the many potential scenarios as an event unfolds.

Transferring knowledge from natural perils

Verisk’s SRCC catastrophe model for the United States applies rigorous probabilistic methods from natural catastrophe modelling to human-driven perils. It simulates 500,000 stochastic years of events, integrating political, social, and economic indicators to estimate event frequencies and severities, and produce high-resolution damage and business interruption loss estimates for a set of exposures down to the ZIP code level. Outputs include average annual loss, exceedance probabilities, and scenario-specific losses, allowing insurers to quantify SRCC exposure with actuarial credibility. This supports more accurate underwriting, pricing, portfolio analysis, and capital allocation as users move beyond qualitative assessments to actionable insights.

Landing on firmer ground

In practice, insurers using the Verisk SRCC model can better anticipate emerging threats, identify high-risk exposures, and strengthen portfolio resilience to severe SRCC loss scenarios, enabling risk-adjusted pricing that better reflects the dynamics and possibilities that SRCC events can bring. As loss estimation for political violence perils increasingly becomes an industry expectation, early adopters will be ahead of the game.

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