I wrapped up my first-ever Climate Week NYC last week at ClimateTech Connect. After their two-day April event in Washington, D.C., I could hardly miss this special half-day update when it was so close to home.
Fifty-plus attendees crammed a room near Grand Central Station, and I immediately spotted familiar faces and had the opportunity to meet with a mix of industry veterans and relative newbies spanning all insurance disciplines, from underwriting and claims to the cutting edge of modeling and artificial intelligence. Top insurance thought leaders and influencers were there to speak on climate-related issues of pressing interest to my industry and everyone it serves. The panel themes and the panelist themselves made it clear from the start that a blog post was not going to do the event justice.
The first panel – Pioneers Shaping the Future of Climate Resilience – was moderated by Francis Bouchard, managing director for climate at Marsh McLennan, whose bona fides include senior positions with Zurich Insurance and the Reinsurance Association of America. Francis moderated a no-holds-barred panel of young insurance leaders: Angela Grant at Palomar, Michael Gulla of Adaptive Insurance, and Valkyrie Holmes of Faura. The energy and expertise of these panelists left me feeling that the industry – in the face of myriad challenges – is being put into good hands.
The next discussion was moderated by Jerry Theodorou, a director at the R Street Institute whose professional background includes roles at Conning, AIG, and Chubb. It featured Dan Kaniewski, managing director and U.S. public sector lead for Marsh McLennan and a former FEMA deputy administrator, and Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for Munich Re. The depth and timeliness of these three experts’ insights made for an engaging and thought-provoking session.
The third panel was both engaging and accessible – a bit surprising to me, given that it consisted entirely of PhDs. Steve Weinstein, CEO of Mangrove Property Insurance led a discussion among Joanna Syroka of Fermat Capital Management, Catherine Ansell of JPMorgan Chase, and M. Cameron Rencurrel at Mercury Insurance on not only “Why Science Needs to Be in the Boardroom,” but HOW young scientists can find their way there and decide IF that’s where they want to be.
Between these panels were presentations from representatives of several insurtechs who shared their data-driven solutions focused on understanding and addressing climate-related panels. All this in a period of about three hours (not including the networking reception afterward). Despite all the information shared, the event did not feel at all rushed.
If you weren’t able to make it and are feeling a bit left out, don’t fret! ClimateTech Connect 2026 will be held in Washington, D.C., on April 8 and 9, 2026.
A recent paper published in Nature that analyzes five major California wildfires confirms what insurers, fire scientists, and risk modelers have long asserted: Defensible space and home hardening help mitigate wildfire risk and improve resilience.
The study found that clearing vegetation and flammable materials within 1.5 meters of a structure — an area known as “Zone 0” — is one of the most effective actions a homeowner can take. When this is paired with home-hardening features like non-combustible siding, enclosed eaves, and vent screens, the results are staggering: predicted losses dropped by as much as 48 percent, according to the study.
Homes built after 1997, when California adopted stricter building codes, consistently outperformed older structures. These newer homes incorporated fire-resistant materials and design features that significantly improved survival rates.
From an insurance perspective, such steps – by leading to reduced losses and fewer, less-costly claims – can alleviate some of the upward pressure on premium rates in areas at higher risk for wildfire. In the long term, they can improve insurance affordability and availability in fire-vulnerable geographies.
Wildfire risk is strongly conditioned by geographic considerations that vary widely across and within states. A recent paper by Triple-I and Guidewire – a provider of software solutions to the insurance industry – used case studies from three California areas with very different geographic and demographic characteristics to go deeper into how such tools can be used to identify properties with attractive risk properties, despite their location in wildfire-prone areas. The use of such data-driven analysis can help insurers identify less risky properties within higher-risk geographies.
The study in Nature examined five major fires from recent history in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – Tubbs (2017), Thomas (2017), Camp (2018), Kincade (2019), and Glass (2020) – using machine learning to analyze on-the-ground post-fire data collection, remotely sensed data, and fire reconstruction modeling to assess patterns of loss and mitigation effectiveness.
Using a tool called an XGBoost classifier, the study found that “structure survivability can be predicted to 82 percent.” The study reported that “spacing between structures is a critical factor influencing fire risk…while fire exposure, the ignition resistance (hardening) of structures, and clearing around structures (defensible space) work in combination” to mitigate that risk.
“With the science-based information from this report, we can reduce risk and make our communities safer from wildfire,” said Janet Ruiz, Triple-I’s California-based director of strategic communication. Accuracy of 82 percent on predictability of structures burning is a major improvement, and mitigation is the key.”
Coordinated community-wide strategies like vegetation management, building code enforcement, and distance between structures are essential. Triple-I and its members and partners are working to inform, educate, and drive behavioral change to reduce risk and build resilience.
Economic shifts, geopolitical uncertainties, cybersecurity trends, and mounting climate perils have created an increasingly severe and interconnected risk crisis, according to participants in a members-only Triple-I webinar.
In an environment constrained, for instance, by frequent natural disasters and rising replacement costs, risks no longer develop in isolation. They collide with and compound each other. Their combined impact exceeds the sum of individual risks’ effects. Such interdependence complicates identifying, let alone mitigating, the forces underpinning a specific risk.
“Under this new system that’s emerging, risk can propagate very rapidly through a host of otherwise disconnected networks,” TradeSecure president and cofounder Scott Jones told webinar host Michel Léonard, Triple-I’s Chief Economist and Data Scientist. “This new reality fundamentally challenges the core principles that insurance has relied on for centuries.”
Jones emphasized the growing unpredictability of risk on a global scale, particularly as nations impose export controls, sanctions, investment restrictions, and tariffs for purposes like economic competition. Companies with global footprints may struggle to ascertain these interwoven, sometimes competing regulations, creating compliance concerns and potentially exacerbating supply-chain disruptions.
With the frequency and severity of U.S. cyber claims on the rise, cyberattacks also carry substantial transnational implications. Sophisticated ransomware encounters can exploit businesses of all sizes, propelling privacy liability claims and related third-party litigation.
TradeSecure vice president and cofounder Michael Beck explained how the almost universal accessibility of malware – harnessed by criminal syndicates, activist groups, or even lone hackers – presents “a new class of systemic non-physical disruption” that could undermine “the entire system’s liquidity and stability.”
“A coordinated non-state cyberattack wouldn’t just steal money – it could stop the flow of money, causing many transaction failures and possibly triggering a wave of claims far beyond what traditional cyber policies are designed to handle,” Beck said.
Though insurers as well as business owners and consumers consider cyber incidents a chief risk concern, personal cyber take-up rates remain low, with the broader cyber insurance market facing its third consecutive year of declining rates. Misunderstandings surrounding cyber risk and benefits of coverage fuel this discrepancy, revealing a gap between agent perceptions of product value and that of their customers.
A climate nonprofit plans to revive a key federal database tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that the Trump Administration stopped updating in May, Bloomberg reported.
The database captures the financial toll of increasingly intense weather events and was used by insurers and others to understand, model, and predict weather perils across the United States. Dr. Adam B. Smith, the former NOAA climatologist who spearheaded the database for more than a decade, has been hired to manage it for the nonprofit, Climate Central.
NOAA in May announced it would stop tracking the cost of the country’s most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage – a move that would leave insurers, researchers, and government policymakers with less reliable information to help understand the patterns of major disasters like hurricanes, drought or wildfires, and their economic consequences.
Climate Central plans to expand beyond the database’s original scope by tracking disasters as small as $100 million and calculating losses from individual wildfires, rather than simply reporting seasonal regional totals.
A record 28 billion-dollar disasters hit the United States in 2023, including a drought that caused $14.8 billion in damages. In 2024, 27 incidents of that scale occurred. Since 1980, an average of nine such events have struck in the United States annually.
This summer – amid deadly wildfires and floods – the Trump Administration has appeared to be rolling back some of its DOGE-driven NOAA funding cuts. NOAA recently announced that it would be hiring 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians for the National Weather Service (NWS), after having terminated over 550 such positions in the already-understaffed agency in the spring.
In addition, the administration’s announced termination of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program — run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — has been held up by a court injunction while legislators debate its future. Congress established BRIC through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to ensure a stable funding source to support mitigation projects annually. The program has allocated more than $5 billion for investment in mitigation projects to alleviate human suffering and avoid economic losses from floods, wildfires, and other disasters.
Regarding the rescue of the NOAA dataset, Colorado State University researcher and Triple-I non-resident scholar Dr. Phil Klotzbach said, “The billion-dollar disaster dataset is important for those of us working to better understand the impacts of tropical cyclones. It uses a consistent methodology to estimate damage caused by natural disasters from 1980 to the present and was a critical input to our papers investigating the relationship between landfalling wind, pressure and damage. I’m very happy to hear that this dataset will continue!”
Amid a summer full of deadly fires and storm-related flooding, the Trump Administration appears to be rolling back some of the spending cuts imposed upon the National Weather Service (NWS) by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – of which NWS is a part – announced at an internal all-hands meeting earlier this month that they will hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians. CNN reported the announcement, citing an unnamed NOAA official. In jointly timed press releases, Congressmen Mike Flood and Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.) and Mike Flood (R-Neb.) acknowledged the planned hirings.
While the decision is welcome news, both congressmen continued to urge their colleagues to pass their bipartisan Weather Workforce Improvement Act to ensure these positions will remain permanent and not be subject to any future reductions.
“For months, Congressman Flood and I have been fighting to get NOAA and NWS employees the support they need in the face of cuts to staff and funding,” Sorenson said. “Hundreds of unfilled positions have caused NWS offices across the country to cancel weather balloon launches, forgo overnight staffing, and force remaining meteorologists to overwork themselves.”
“For decades the National Weather Service has helped keep our communities safe with accurate and timely forecasts,” said Flood, adding that the NOAA announcement “sends a message that they’re focused on strengthening the NWS for years to come.”
NOAA and FEMA cuts raised fears
It’s not just the NOAA and NWS cuts that have raised concerns. On April 4, 2025, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that it would be ending its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program and cancel all BRIC applications from fiscal years 2020-2023. Congress established BRIC through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to ensure a stable funding source to support mitigation projects annually. The program has allocated more than $5 billion for investment in mitigation projects to alleviate human suffering and avoid economic losses from floods, wildfires, and other disasters.
At the time, Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), called the decision to terminate BRIC “beyond reckless.”
“Although ASFPM has had some qualms about how FEMA’s BRIC program was implemented, it was still a cornerstone of our nation’s hazard mitigation strategy, and the agency has worked to make improvements each year,” Berginnis said. “Eliminating it entirely — mid-award cycle, no less — defies common sense.”
Resilience investment is key to long-term insurance availability and affordability. Average insured catastrophe losses have been on the rise for decades, reflecting a combination of climate-related factors and demographic trends as more people have moved into harm’s way.
Efforts have been made to save BRIC, and a U.S. District Judge in Boston recently granted a preliminary injunction sought by 20 Democrat-led states while their lawsuit over the funding moves ahead. Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled the Trump Administration cannot reallocate $4 billion meant to help communities protect against natural disasters.
In his ruling, Stearns said he was not convinced Congress had given FEMA any discretion to redirect the funds. The states had also shown that the “balance of hardship and public interest” was in their favor.
“There is an inherent public interest in ensuring that the government follows the law, and the potential hardship accruing to the States from the funds being repurposed is great,” Stearns wrote. “The BRIC program is designed to protect against natural disasters and save lives.”
Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $80 billion in the first six months of 2025 alone, making it the second-costliest first half on record since data collection began decades ago, according to reports by reinsurance giants Munich Re and Swiss Re.
Both reports called out the devastating wildfires that swept through Los Angeles County in January as the single most destructive event to date, with both firms estimating that these fires caused $40 billion in insured losses.
What makes these disasters particularly alarming is their timing and location. Both reports emphasized that the Los Angeles fires occurred during California’s normally wet winter season, when such massive blazes are typically unheard of. This seasonal shift represents a troubling new pattern, in which dangerous fire conditions persist year-round, rather than just during traditional fire season.
The reports also agree that severe thunderstorms across the American Midwest and South continued to cause billions in additional damage throughout spring, reinforcing how weather-related disasters are becoming both more frequent and more costly as communities expand into high-risk areas.
Swiss Re and Munich Re both identify the same underlying drivers making these disasters so expensive: More people are building homes and businesses in dangerous areas like wildfire-prone zones and tornado alleys, while climate change is making extreme weather events more intense and unpredictable.
The reports agree that this combination of increased development in risky locations and worsening weather conditions means that what happened in the first half of 2025 is likely just a preview of even costlier disasters to come, unless communities take serious steps to build more resilient infrastructure and avoid construction in the most hazardous areas.
Cat losses and replacement costs
Swiss Re emphasized the growing wildfire threat, pointing out that, before 2015, wildfires on average contributed around 1 percent of the total insured losses from all natural catastrophes worldwide.
“In the last 10 years, this has risen to 7 percent, the costliest periods being a two-year stretch of 2017‒18, and to a lesser extent 2020,” the report said.
Swiss Re also points to severe impact of post-pandemic construction cost inflation, noting that “construction costs rose by 35.64 percent from January 2020 to June 2025, directly impacting property claims costs.” These higher costs to repair and replace property significantly increase the financial impact of each disaster.
“The best way to avoid losses is to implement effective preventive measures, such as more robust construction for buildings and infrastructure to better withstand natural disasters,” said Thomas Blunck, a member of Munich Re’s Board of Management. “Such precautions can help to maintain reasonable insurance premiums, even in high-risk areas. And most importantly: to reduce future exposure, new building development should not be allowed in high-risk areas.”
Swiss Re cautions that climate change is creating more volatile and unpredictable loss patterns, making catastrophe losses “more difficult to predict.” Together, these trends suggest the U.S. insurance market must prepare for sustained pressure on pricing and availability, particularly in high-risk coastal and wildland-urban interface regions.
Devastating flooding in central Texas over the July 4, 2025, weekend highlighted several aspects of the state’s risk profile that also are relevant to the rest of the country, according to the latest Triple-I Issues Brief. One is the rising incidence of severe inland flooding related to tropical storms.
Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Mexico on June 29 and weakened quickly, but its remnant moisture drifted northward into Texas, according to Dr. Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and a Triple-I non-resident scholar.
“A slow-moving low-pressure area developed and helped bring up the moisture-rich air rom Barry and concentrated it over the Hill Country of central Texas,” Klotzbach said. “The soil was also extremely hard from prior drought conditions, which exacerbated the flash flooding that occurred.”
Such flooding far from landfall has become more frequent and severe in recent years. In Texas – as in much of the United States, particularly far from the coasts – few homeowners have flood insurance. Many believe flood damage is covered by their homeowners’ or renters’ insurance. Others believe the coverage is not worth buying if their mortgage lender doesn’t require it. In Kerr County, where much of the July 4 flooding took place, flood insurance take-up rates through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) were 2.5 percent.
Convective storms, fires, and freezes
But tropical storms aren’t always the impetus for flooding. In July 2023, a series of intense thunderstorms resulted in heavy rainfall, deadly flash floods, and severe river flooding in eastern Kentucky and central Appalachia. The conditions that lead to such severe convective storms also are prevalent in Texas.
Severe convective storms are a growing source of losses for property/casualty insurers. According to Gallagher Re, severe convective storm events in 2023 and 2024 “have cost global insurers a remarkable US$143 billion, of which US$120 billion occurred in the U.S. alone.”
Given its aridity and winds, it should be no surprise that Texas is highly subject to wildfire – but the state also has been increasingly prone to severe winter storms and debilitating freezes. On Valentine’s Day 2021, snow fell across most of Texas, accumulating as temperatures stayed below freezing and precipitation continued through the night. A catastrophic failure of the state’s independent electric grid exacerbated these conditions as snow and ice shut down roads and many homes suffered pipe bursts and multiple days without power.
Texas’s 2021 experience illustrates how grid instability can act as a “risk multiplier” for natural disasters. The entire U.S. electric power grid is increasingly vulnerable as the infrastructure ages and proliferating AI data centers increase demand.
Need for data and collaboration
The severe damage and loss of life from the July 4 flooding have naturally raised the question of whether the Trump Administration’s reductions in National Weather Service staffing contributed to the high human cost of this event. While it is hard to say with certainty, these cuts have affected how NWS works – for example, in its use of weather balloons to monitor weather. As early as April, staffing data gathered by NWS indicated that field offices were “critically understaffed”.
In June, panelists at Triple-I’s Joint Industry Forum expressed concern about the impact of the federal cuts on weather monitoring and modeling, as well as programs to help communities adequately prepare for and recover from disasters. Triple-I has published extensively on the need for insurers to shift from exclusively focusing on repairing and replacing property to predicting events and preventing damage.
Collective action at all levels – individual, commercial, and government – is needed to mitigate risks, build resilience, and reduce fraud and legal system abuse. Triple-I and its members are committed to fostering such action and regularly provide data and analysis to inform the necessary conversations.
Recent developments in the atmosphere over the Caribbean Sea have led researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) to make slight improvements to their hurricane forecast for the 2025 Atlantic-basin season, in an update published Wednesday.
Triple-I non-resident scholar Phil Klotzbach, Ph.D., a senior research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU, and the CSU TC-RAMS research team are now predicting 16 total named storms through the end of the year, a small drop from their original forecast of 17.
“The primary reason for the slight decrease in our outlook is both observed and predicted high levels of Caribbean wind shear,” Klotzbach said. “High levels of Caribbean shear in June and July are typically associated with less active hurricane seasons.”
Klotzbach warned, however, that peak hurricane season – which typically occurs from mid-August through late October – could still be very active, despite current atmospheric conditions.
“The subtropical eastern Atlantic and portions of the tropical Atlantic are warmer than normal,” he said. “The current Atlantic sea surface temperature pattern is fairly similar to what we typically observe in July prior to active Atlantic hurricane seasons.”
Identifying key risk trends amid an increasingly complex risk landscape was a dominant theme throughout Triple-I’s 2025 Joint Industry Forum – particularly during the panel spotlighting some of the insurance industry’s C-suite leaders.
Moderated by CNBC correspondent Contessa Brewer, the panel consisted of:
J. Powell Brown, president and CEO of Brown & Brown Inc.;
John J. Marchioni, chairman, president, and CEO of Selective Insurance Group;
Susan Rivera, CEO of Tokio Marine HCC (TMHCC); and
Rohit Verma, president and CEO of Crawford & Co.
Their discussion provided insight into how insurers can transform these uncertainties into opportunities for business development and for cultivating deeper connections with consumers.
Recouping policyholder trust
Given the volatility of the current risk environment – exacerbated by various ongoing geopolitical conflicts and the rising frequency and severity of natural catastrophes – it is more imperative than ever to reaffirm the intrinsic human element of insurance, the panelists agreed.
“That’s one of the most underappreciated aspects of our industry,” Marchioni said. “We make communities safer and put people’s lives and businesses back together after an unexpected loss. Being the calming force when you have unsettling events like this happen around the world is a big part of what we do.”
Yet prevailing public perception continues to indicate otherwise, even as insurers report repeated losses or nominal profits compared to other industries.
“The insurance industry may be the only industry where record profits are a problem,” CNBC’s Brewer added, because consumers tend to “not care whether it’s coming from your investments, or whether it’s coming from your underwriting business or your reinsurance. They just hear that you’re making record profits.”
Brown noted that consumer mistrust derives, in part, from “a very active plaintiffs’ bar,” which the American Tort Reform Association estimates spent over $2.5 billion for nearly 27 million ads across the United States last year. He further discussed how, though the average homeowners’ insurance premium rate in Florida will increase this year, his home state has enjoyed far more stable rates after tort reforms eased litigation costs on insurers.
Previous research by the Insurance Research Council (IRC) – like Triple-I, an affiliate of the Institutes – showed that most consumers perceive the link between attorney advertising and higher insurance costs. Crawford’s Verma, however, emphasized that this awareness does not necessarily translate into consumers understanding their own agency.
“It’s easier for homeowners to understand how the weather impacts potential losses and the fact that weather patterns have changed,” Verma said. “But when it comes to [legal system abuse], I don’t think that connection is as well understood.”
Reflecting on a record high in nuclear verdicts last year, Rivera suggested insurers must reconfigure how they communicate legal system abuse to consumers.
“Where are those hospital professional liability verdicts going to go?” he said. “They’re going to go back into the cost of health care at the end of the day.”
Leading the AI charge
Maintaining consumer centricity while implementing or experimenting with technological innovations – especially generative AI – was a unifying objective for all the panelists.
“We look at AI as an enabler,” Brown said, “so we can put teammates in a position to spend more time with customers, which is the most important thing.”
For Tokio Marine’s Rivera, AI “ultimately helps all of our insureds” by boosting operational efficiency while reducing operational costs, as well as facilitating more proactive risk management than ever before. A growing percentage of insurance executives appear to agree, as generative AI models continue to expedite data processing across the insurance value chain, reshaping underwriting, pricing, claims, and customer service.
Such efficiency, paired with the potential for improved decision-making, is crucial “in our dramatically changing environment,” Marchioni stressed.
“We have thousands of claims every day,” he said. “Thinking about lawsuit abuse as a backdrop – a claims adjuster, every day, has to make decisions regarding, ‘Do I settle this claim based on injuries or venue? What’s the value of the injury and of the claim? Who’s the plaintiffs’ attorney?’ These tools give more refined information so your knowledge workers can make better, more timely decisions.”
Generative AI fails, however, when base datasets are insufficient, outdated, or inaccurate, Brown pointed out. Training AI models uncritically can lead to outputs containing false and/or nonsensical information, commonly known as “hallucinations”.
At their current capacity, at least, AI models cannot draw the kinds of salient conclusions that adjustors and underwriters can, meaning AI could “change the way we work, but it’s not going to replace the jobs,” Verma said.
Though they do not currently exist in the United States at the federal level, AI regulations have already been introduced in some states, following a comprehensive AI Act enacted last year in Europe. With more legislation on the horizon, insurers must help lead these conversations to ensure that AI regulations suit the complex needs of insurance, without hindering the industry’s commitments to equity and security.
A 2024 report by Triple-I and SAS, a global leader in data and AI, centers the insurance industry’s role in guiding conversations around ethical AI implementation on a global, multi-sector scale, given insurers’ unique expertise in analyzing and preserving data integrity.
Insurance industry executives and thought leaders gathered yesterday for Triple-I’s Joint Industry Forum (JIF) in Chicago to discuss the trends, economics, geopolitics, and policy influencing the market today, as well as ways to navigate these complexities while focusing on making their products affordable and available for consumers.
Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan in his opening remarks, noted that effective risk management depends on collaboration across stakeholder groups, as interconnected perils “present a community problem, not just an industry problem.”
JIF keynote speaker Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple said facilitating community resilience planning is a top priority for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). The NAIC’s 2025 initiative – “Securing Tomorrow: Advancing State-Based Regulation” – aims to improve disaster mitigation and recovery by consolidating “the collective expertise of experienced state regulators from across the country, who can share real-time insights and proven strategies,” Temple said.
Among the initiative’s goals is aggregating more data from insurers to better understand challenges to affordability and availability on state levels, which the NAIC can then translate into actionable policy proposals. Such data calls, Temple said, help regulators, legislators, and policyholders focus on improving the cost drivers of insurance rates.
Louisiana has consistently been among the least affordable states for homeowners and auto insurance, according to the Insurance Research Council (IRC), in part because of its reputation for being plaintiff-friendly in civil litigation. Significant tort legislation has been approved in the state, but resistance to reform remains a challenge.
Getting to the roots of high premiums
After a recent data call in his home state, Temple told the JIF audience, “For the first time in Louisiana, we’re not talking about only premiums. We’re talking about why premiums are where they are.”
A critical lack of transparency surrounding cost drivers persists, however. Temple criticized the National Flood Insurance Program’s Risk Rating 2.0 reforms for not publicly disclosing more information “for individuals and communities to identify and address factors driving up their premiums,” such as “whether increased rates take into account levee systems, pump stations, and other things designed to help mitigate against floods.”
Conversely, government programs like Strengthen Alabama Homes – and the numerous programs it inspired, including in Louisiana – have demonstrated success in communicating the benefits of resilience investments for consumers and policymakers.
“We’re seeing major positive results after just a few short years,” Temple said, noting that, since early 2024, over 5,000 homeowners not chosen for Louisiana’s grant program still decided to invest in the same hazard mitigation, as they may still qualify for the corresponding state-mandated insurance discounts.
“As natural disasters become more frequent and severe, state regulators will continue to drive forward common-sense policies that protect consumers and ensure that insurance remains available and reliable for at-risk communities,” Temple concluded. Developing the database required for such policies is a necessary first step.
Keep an eye on the Triple-I Blog for further JIF coverage.
