Closing Protection Gaps: Uninsurability and Equity in India under Rising Climate Risk

Climate change is rapidly eroding the boundaries of insurability, especially in low- and middle-income countries where institutional fragility compounds physical hazard exposure. This paper develops a novel district-level Uninsurability Index for India, integrating high-resolution flood hazard projections under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios with measures of insurance system performance and social equity derived from crop insurance data. Results for 676 districts reveal stark spatial disparities: while most districts currently fall in the ''very low'' or ''low'' uninsurability range, exposure intensifies sharply under RCP 8.5, doubling the number of high-risk districts. Sensitivity analysis shows that institutional choices are decisive: progressive reforms in coverage and inclusion can reduce high-risk districts by one-fifth, whereas regressive policy erosion doubles them and creates extreme cases of structural uninsurability. The findings demonstrate that uninsurability is not predetermined by hazard alone, but emerges from the intersection of climatic extremes, weak institutional delivery, and inequitable access. By proposing a typology of actuarial, market, and social uninsurability and operationalizing it in a composite index, this study offers a transferable diagnostic tool for identifying resilience thresholds in Global South contexts. The results underscore the urgent need for anticipatory governance and equity-sensitive climate finance to close protection gaps and to treat insurance systems as adaptive infrastructure for climate resilience.