As insurers begin pulling out of climate-vulnerable states, officials are pleading with the companies to stay, yet their prices might be too high for residents to afford.
What's happening?
Last year, the United States experienced a record number of billion-dollar disasters before the calendar turned to September. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the damages of the 28 weather and climate disasters reached nearly $93 billion. As a result, insurers have been raising premiums or pulling out of states they deem too risky.
In June, the Associated Press (via the Tampa Bay Times) reported that leaders are bending over backward to convince insurers to provide coverage in their states, allowing the companies to raise premiums and drop certain policies. Some have removed red tape so insurers can adjust rates on short notice and made it more difficult for residents to sue.
Why is this concerning?
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's latest report, floods, storms, earthquakes, droughts, wildfires, and other weather-related and geophysical disasters internally displaced more than 26 million people in 2023.
However, as the AP report highlights, that displacement is sometimes only the first wave, as most mortgage lenders require insurance. Yet high costs or lack of affordable coverage can push residents out of areas they've lived in for years. Homeowners in Florida, California, and Louisiana are among those struggling to find insurers willing to cover them.
While efforts to stabilize the insurance market are underway, including by offering state-run plans, experts are unsure if it will pay off in the long run. That's because as global temperatures have risen, extreme weather events have become more intense and frequent.
"Insurers are the climate change canary in the coal mine," former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones — now the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley — told the AP. "While these policy and regulatory interventions might help in the short run, they're likely to be overwhelmed by the increasing risk and loss."
What can be done about this?
Since the burning of dirty fuels such as gas, oil, and coal is the main cause of the accelerated warming of the planet, reducing our reliance on them and increasing the ability to power our homes and businesses with clean energy can help bring things back into balance.
Happily, the world is making progress on that front. While the International Energy Agency notes more needs to be done to meet the goals agreed upon at the 2023 U.N. Climate Change Conference, global renewable energy capacity grew by 50% last year.
Signing up for community solar or installing solar panels can help support those efforts and result in significant savings on electric bills. (Americans may also qualify for tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act to lower the upfront cost of panels.)
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