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New data shows just how bad the climate insurance crisis has become

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Thursday, December 19, 2024

Five hurricanes made landfall in the United States this year, causing half a trillion dollars in damages. Flooding devastated mountain towns along the East Coast. Scores of wildfires burned almost 8 million acres nationwide. As such events grow more common, and more devastating, homeowners are seeing their insurance premiums spike — or insurers ditch them all together. An analysis released Wednesday by the Senate Committee on the Budget found that the rate at which insurance contracts are being dropped rose significantly in recent years, particularly in states most exposed to climate risks. In all, 1.9 million policies were not renewed. “Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who chairs the budget committee, said at a hearing on the matter Wednesday. “It is an economic threat, and it is an affordability issue that we should not ignore.” For those with insurance, premiums rose 44 percent between 2011 and 2021, and another 11 percent last year, according to a report the congressional Joint Economic Committee also released this week. A Democratic analyst on the Joint Economic Committee, or JEC, who requested anonymity to comment publicly, said, “The model of insurance as it stands right now isn’t working.” Clayton Aldern / Grist The JEC report included a state-by-state breakdown of premium increases and risk ranking based on climate perils. Florida topped the list on both fronts, and saw a whopping $1,272 climb in annual premiums between 2020 and 2023. Michigan saw the smallest increase at $136. No state saw a decrease over that time. “This isn’t a red or blue state issue,” said the analyst. “It’s widely applicable across the nation.” Florida also topped the list when it comes to the number of non-renewals, according to the Senate committee report that examined state and county level data. The rate nearly tripled between 2018 and 2023. Nationwide, in 2023, 48 of the top 50 counties — and 82 of the top 100 counties — with the highest rates of non-renewal were either flood-prone, faced elevated wildfire risk, or both. Climate-exacerbated disasters can batter insurance markets because those events create massive financial liabilities for insurance providers, and the companies, called re-insurers, that underwrite them. “Ultimately, all those groups are raising their prices and it’s the homeowners who have to pay in the end,” said Phillip Mulder, an economist and expert on risk and insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business. He was a co-author of the state-level dataset that helped underpin the JEC’s work. Not everyone at the Senate hearing agreed on the role climate change plays in insurance markets. “The insurance industry is not in the midst of a climate-driven crisis, nor is it about to fall,” Robert Hartwig, an economist and associate professor at the University of South Carolina, told lawmakers. “Climate risk is an important determinant in the cost of insurance, but there has been a tendency, however, to over attribute the impact of climate change when describing the state of insurance markets.” What is clear is that costly natural disasters are becoming more frequent, with the average time between billion-dollar events dropping from four months in 1980 to approximately three weeks today. As those risks grow, some insurers are pulling out states entirely. For example, State Farm and Allstate have left California, and dozens of smaller companies have collapsed or fled Florida and Louisiana. When that happens, homeowners must turn to government-backed insurers of last resort, which are available in just 26 states and typically cost more than private coverage. Enrollment in those state-run plans have skyrocketed, the JEC report notes, and they now cover more than $1 trillion in assets. “It all falls on the states,” Rob Moore, director of the Water & Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the current regulatory set up. “The federal government has very little role to play on the insurance market.” The JEC report outlines a number of steps Congress could take to give itself a greater role in addressing the problem. For example, it highlights the need for more data collection through initiatives like the Wildfire Insurance Coverage Study Act to better understand the problem. It also points to the proposed Shelter Act, which would provide homeowners with a tax credit covering 25 percent of disaster mitigation improvements that bolster their property’s resilience, reduce the risk of catastrophic damage, and, consequently, lower their premiums. Moore agreed that adapting old homes, and future-proofing new ones, will be key to righting insurance markets. “The real long term problem is we’re trying to ensure structures that were never built for the risks and vulnerabilities that they now face,” he said. “If you want an insurable structure 30 years from now, we have to build it today.” Another shift the report mentions is the possibility of the federal government becoming a re-insurer that backstops climate-stressed insurance markets, something the proposed INSURE Act calls for. France, Japan, and New Zealand have such programs, and the report argues that such a move in the U.S. “could simplify a complicated insurance sector and transfer risks associated with catastrophes to the Federal government.” For now, though, none of those initiatives have progressed in Congress and all of them are sponsored by Democrats. With Republicans taking control of the House, Senate, and presidency, it remains unclear whether the bills have much of a future. “That’s a question everyone’s thinking about,” the committee analyst said, noting that taking a dollars-and-cents approach could make the issue resonate across the political spectrum. “Wildfires are raging and we’re seeing more and more flooding. This issue isn’t going away.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New data shows just how bad the climate insurance crisis has become on Dec 19, 2024.

Two Congressional reports make clear that, with increasingly frequent hurricanes, floods and fires, "the model of insurance as it stands right now isn't working."

An analysis released Wednesday by the Senate Committee on the Budget found that the rate at which insurance contracts are being dropped rose significantly in recent years, particularly in states most exposed to climate risks. In all, 1.9 million policies were not renewed.

“Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who chairs the budget committee, said at a hearing on the matter Wednesday. “It is an economic threat, and it is an affordability issue that we should not ignore.”

For those with insurance, premiums rose 44 percent between 2011 and 2021, and another 11 percent last year, according to a report the congressional Joint Economic Committee also released this week. A Democratic analyst on the Joint Economic Committee, or JEC, who requested anonymity to comment publicly, said, “The model of insurance as it stands right now isn’t working.”

The JEC report included a state-by-state breakdown of premium increases and risk ranking based on climate perils. Florida topped the list on both fronts, and saw a whopping $1,272 climb in annual premiums between 2020 and 2023. Michigan saw the smallest increase at $136. No state saw a decrease over that time.

“This isn’t a red or blue state issue,” said the analyst. “It’s widely applicable across the nation.”

Florida also topped the list when it comes to the number of non-renewals, according to the Senate committee report that examined state and county level data. The rate nearly tripled between 2018 and 2023. Nationwide, in 2023, 48 of the top 50 counties — and 82 of the top 100 counties — with the highest rates of non-renewal were either flood-prone, faced elevated wildfire risk, or both.

Climate-exacerbated disasters can batter insurance markets because those events create massive financial liabilities for insurance providers, and the companies, called re-insurers, that underwrite them. “Ultimately, all those groups are raising their prices and it’s the homeowners who have to pay in the end,” said Phillip Mulder, an economist and expert on risk and insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business. He was a co-author of the state-level dataset that helped underpin the JEC’s work.

Not everyone at the Senate hearing agreed on the role climate change plays in insurance markets.

“The insurance industry is not in the midst of a climate-driven crisis, nor is it about to fall,” Robert Hartwig, an economist and associate professor at the University of South Carolina, told lawmakers. “Climate risk is an important determinant in the cost of insurance, but there has been a tendency, however, to over attribute the impact of climate change when describing the state of insurance markets.”

What is clear is that costly natural disasters are becoming more frequent, with the average time between billion-dollar events dropping from four months in 1980 to approximately three weeks today. As those risks grow, some insurers are pulling out states entirely. For example, State Farm and Allstate have left California, and dozens of smaller companies have collapsed or fled Florida and Louisiana.

When that happens, homeowners must turn to government-backed insurers of last resort, which are available in just 26 states and typically cost more than private coverage. Enrollment in those state-run plans have skyrocketed, the JEC report notes, and they now cover more than $1 trillion in assets.

“It all falls on the states,” Rob Moore, director of the Water & Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the current regulatory set up. “The federal government has very little role to play on the insurance market.”

The JEC report outlines a number of steps Congress could take to give itself a greater role in addressing the problem. For example, it highlights the need for more data collection through initiatives like the Wildfire Insurance Coverage Study Act to better understand the problem. It also points to the proposed Shelter Act, which would provide homeowners with a tax credit covering 25 percent of disaster mitigation improvements that bolster their property’s resilience, reduce the risk of catastrophic damage, and, consequently, lower their premiums.

Moore agreed that adapting old homes, and future-proofing new ones, will be key to righting insurance markets. “The real long term problem is we’re trying to ensure structures that were never built for the risks and vulnerabilities that they now face,” he said. “If you want an insurable structure 30 years from now, we have to build it today.”

Another shift the report mentions is the possibility of the federal government becoming a re-insurer that backstops climate-stressed insurance markets, something the proposed INSURE Act calls for. France, Japan, and New Zealand have such programs, and the report argues that such a move in the U.S. “could simplify a complicated insurance sector and transfer risks associated with catastrophes to the Federal government.”

For now, though, none of those initiatives have progressed in Congress and all of them are sponsored by Democrats. With Republicans taking control of the House, Senate, and presidency, it remains unclear whether the bills have much of a future.

“That’s a question everyone’s thinking about,” the committee analyst said, noting that taking a dollars-and-cents approach could make the issue resonate across the political spectrum. “Wildfires are raging and we’re seeing more and more flooding. This issue isn’t going away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New data shows just how bad the climate insurance crisis has become on Dec 19, 2024.

Read the full story here.

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The program was created in 2022 and has had annual congressional appropriations of $40 million, according to a December NIH report that was taken offline by the agency earlier this year.“HHS is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities,” said Emily Hilliard, a department spokesperson.“As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans,” she added. “We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root cause of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”She did not respond to questions about whether HHS believes that research into the health effects of heat and other types of extreme weather are aligned with agency priorities or whether HHS believes that heat waves affect the health of Americans. NIH did not respond to a request for comment.Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency within HHS. Heat caused or contributed to at least 2,300 deaths in 2023, CDC records show.In addition to turbocharging temperatures, climate change can affect people's health by increasing the prevalence of vector-borne diseases and the number of wildfires, whose smoke has been shown to increase asthma and cause cardiovascular problems.Those connections have long been studied with funding from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. Then in 2022, NIH broadened the scope of federal funding for climate health research, directing each of the agency’s 26 centers and institutes to study the dangers of climate change. At the time, the agency said “a mounting number of assessments and reports provide undeniable evidence that climate change is resulting in … direct and indirect consequences for human health and well-being.”Most of the climate researchers contacted by POLITICO's E&E News declined to talk publicly about their funding, citing concerns about their grants being rescinded if they spoke to the media.One researcher who was awarded federal funding said some experts in the climate and health field are pausing work related to their grants, like hiring.Others have turned down speaking requests because they're concerned about attracting attention from the Trump administration. Their work often focuses on how extreme weather has disproportional effects on the health of communities of color, according to several researchers who were granted anonymity for fear of retribution. One said that they declined a speaking invitation to avoid “accidentally us[ing] language we are not supposed to and then be told our language is not compliant with various executive orders” on diversity and equality.“We’ve been told we need to comply with those executive orders as federal grantees, but it’s hard to do if you are funded for something that the name is something you are not allowed to say,” the researcher said. “No one wants to do a social media post or a webinar or an event that might get them in trouble.”An annual conference hosted by NIH, Boston University and the Harvard School of Public Health was postponed earlier this month.Linda Birnbaum, who led the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences until 2017, said that during the first Trump administration, researchers were able to circumvent directives by wording grant applications as “climate and health” rather than “climate change.”“It worked then. I don’t think that will work anymore,” she said.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

Climate

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Pollution

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CO2? CO-Nee!

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Chicken Soup for the Soil

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