There's a difference between protecting yourself from something and protecting yourself for something. An insurance policy can't protect you from disasters. Having an insurance policy doesn't have any effect on the probability of them happening to you. It can only protect you from their consequences, or mitigate the damage they may do you if they do happen to you. So it can provide you with protection for them, protection for, not from, the eventuality of them happening to you. Similarly you could speak of protecting yourself for a conflict, when you can't prevent it from happening; it means taking measures in advance to ensure that the damage it can do to you is minimised: putting on armour, for example. Protecting yourself from a conflict is different; it implies avoiding it, preventing it from happening to you at all.

Certainly you can also prepare yourself for disasters, but that's not the same thing. Preparing yourself might be simply adjusting yourself mentally to the prospect, for example. It doesn't necessarily involve taking steps to protect yourself.

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Note added at 35 mins (2015-09-23 21:59:11 GMT)
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You can protect yourself from disasters, in the sense of doing things that make it less likely they will happen to you. You can protect yourself from burglary by locking your home, having a burglar alarm, etc. But taking out insurance doesn't protect you from burglary; it protects you for burglary by protecting you from its consequences.