In recent years, steadily climbing natural disaster losses have increased the need to promote new financial risk transfer mechanisms, including insurance, as a mitigation tool to build resilient communities to recover faster after disaster occurrence. However, while the societal need for such policies is high, demand for natural disaster insurance typically is still low. While there is ample research on positive adoption decisions, reasons for non‐adoption has not yet received the attention it deserves. Using the case of earthquake insurance in Turkey, this study investigates how public policy makers and insurance companies can differentiate non‐adopter segments and consequently develop targeted strategies to stimulate the uptake of disaster insurance. Our study develops a non‐adopter typology consisting of four segments—state reliant positivist, dependers, adversaries, and uninformed loners. Differences among segments provide policy makers and insurance companies with meaningful insights to design and consequently introduce affordable natural disaster insurance to the market.

IntroductionAnkara is situated in the Central Anatolia Region (Figure 1) with a population of 4,842,136 in 2012, which is equivalent to 6.4% of the total population of Turkey. It is the second largest city in Turkey. There are 25 districts in Ankara and 96% of Ankara's population lives within the investigated area.The city is surrounded by 4 main fault lines: the North Anatolia Fault Zone (NAF) in the north, the Ezinepazarı Fault in the east, the Tuzgölü Fault Zone in the southeast, and the İnönü-Eskişehir Fault Zone in the west and south-west. These faults have the potential to create an earthquake with magnitudes of greater than 7.0 on the Richter scale (M ≥ 7.0). This is a very important seismic threat to Ankara. In addition to these main faults, there are numerous active faults within the province and its surroundings, including the city centre. These additional active faults can cause small-to medium-scale earthquakes (5.0 < M < 6.0) with possible losses.Few people believe that there is a seismic hazard in Ankara as the city has not experienced large devastating earthquakes in recent history. However, the active fault lines surrounding the city clearly pose a substantial threat, which this study set out to explore in detail. The Van earthquake of 23 October 2011 resulted in a strong political will for 'urban transformation' . It is also well known that most of the current building stock in Turkey is highly vulnerable to earthquakes and needs to be reconstructed or retrofitted. The probabilistic results published in this study can also be used by policymakers to prepare efficient hazard mitigation plans for Ankara. This paper provides background information on existing studies and details of the region. Next, the methodology is presented. Results and suggestions conclude the paper.Ankara is situated in a fourth-degree earthquake hazard zone [i.e. expected peak ground acceleration (PGA) is 0.1-0.2 g] according to the current official seismic hazard zonation map of Turkey, which was published in 1996. During the preparation of this map, Turkey was divided into 17 source regions. Using a probabilistic approach, the map was produced to show any 90% nonexceedance probability of PGA over a 50-year period.

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