Floods, storms, fires and other disasters are costing Australia more than $6 billion each year, a figure predicted to more than triple in the next 30 years.
At the height of the disaster season, experts are calling on "chronically underinsured" Australians to mitigate risk by planning ahead. 
"Two factors that have a strong impact on the ability to bounce back from disasters is the degree of damage sustained and ... the ability to financially fund the recovery," said David Sinai, head of property treaty underwriting at Swiss Re Australia and New Zealand.
"With this in mind, the most important steps should happen well before the disaster strikes."
In a panel briefing on disaster management hosted by the Australian Science Media Centre, Mr Sinai said home owners needed to ensure they had both the physical and financial resilience to manage a natural hazard.
Good planning decisions, flood controls, building codes and retrofitting are key to reducing the impact of disaster on assets such as people's homes, and insurance ensures the cost of recovery doesn't become a drag on the economy.
Tuesday marked the fifth anniversary of the Christchurch earthquakes, which gave rise to approximately $NZ40 billion ($37.1b) of economic loss.
The upside, Mr Sinai said, was that "80 per cent of that loss was insured, resulting in a relatively small 4 per cent net impact to GDP".
He contrasted this with the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, a country which suffered $8 billion of economic loss, of which only 1 per cent was insured, having a 130 per cent impact on their GDP.
Economics researcher at Monash University Associate Professor Paul Raschky said the "good news" was that economies like Australia tended to recover well.
"We find only very large natural disasters have an impact on economic growth ...that is only in countries with weak political institutions," he said.
He said "charity hazard" is of greater concern in Australia: some people remain uninsured or underinsured because they anticipate government and private aid.
Insurance Council of Australia spokesperson Campbell Fuller said the "charity hazard" mentality was an unfortunate reality. "The expectation that government will step in and fix the problem is not true. Government cannot afford to and it's not the role of government to do so," he said.
Current estimates put the cost of Australia's natural hazards at $6 billion a year, but that is set to increase when new estimates by the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities come out in   March, including economic costs of the social impacts of disasters.