New Zealand insurer Tower has warned that rising weather-related claims could nearly halve its annual profit, as its outgoing chair criticised a lack of government action on climate change.
At Tower’s annual meeting on Wednesday, the company said it had already paid out about $12 million of its $45 million large events fund – roughly a quarter – following a series of storms across the country. Chief executive Paul Johnston told shareholders the costs related to several recent events.
“This includes the October windstorm, the Timaru hailstorm in November, and the late January nationwide storm,” Johnston said.
He added that claims from storms over the past several days were still being assessed and were expected to push the company beyond its large events threshold. If the entire $45m fund is exhausted, Tower’s full-year underlying profit is forecast to fall to between $55m and $65m – down from a record $107m in 2025.
Johnston said the early part of the financial year had been steady, with growth in house policies, premium increases, and new customers. The company said its risk-based pricing model was helping build a less financially vulnerable business.
Retiring chair Michael Stiassny used the meeting to deliver a pointed critique of the response to climate change at both industry and government levels, citing recent tragedies in Mount Maunganui, Papamoa, and Warkworth.
“In the wake of the tragic events at Mount Maunganui, Papamoa, and Warkworth, we face a chilling reality. Climate change is here, and it’s costing lives and money,” Stiassny said.
He described progress on tackling the impacts of extreme weather events as “haphazard, inadequate, and painfully slow”, and said that three years after Cyclone Gabrielle, no decisive action had been taken to prevent loss of life, stop building on flood plains, or protect against increasingly frequent and severe rain events.
“Are we confident that our infrastructure is resilient and will cope with large storms that are no longer anomalies? The answer is a resounding no,” Stiassny said.
Tower’s warning comes amid one of the most destructive stretches of severe weather New Zealand has experienced in recent years. The January 2026 storms alone killed at least nine people across the North Island, according to RNZ. A landslide at a Mount Maunganui campground on Jan. 22 killed six people, including two teenagers, while a separate slip in the neighbouring suburb of Papamoa killed a 71-year-old woman and her 10-year-old grandson. A man was also swept away near Warkworth after trying to cross the Mahurangi River.
Tauranga recorded 274mm of rain on Jan. 22 – its wettest day on record – while Whitianga received 247.6mm, and some areas saw a month's worth of rainfall in just 36 hours, according to MetService data cited by RNZ.
The October 2025 windstorm – one of the events Tower specifically cited – triggered over $50m in paid claims for rural insurer FMG, making it the second-costliest event in that company’s history. By November, more than 7,000 insurance claims had been filed in the South Island alone from that storm.
The frequency of emergencies in 2026 has also drawn attention from civil authorities. By mid-February, eight severe weather-related states of emergency had already been declared this year, matching the total for all of 2025, according to 1News.
