U.S. Insurance Companies Must Now Get Serious About Assessing ...

Eric Hamiter via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

In a landmark move, California, New York, and Washington state are requiring insurance companies to disclose their plans for dealing with climate change. This means, essentially, that the nation's larger insurers will have to start getting serious about assessing?and publicly disclosing?the risks posed by global warming.

The New York Times reports:

Insurance commissioners in California, New York and Washington State will require that companies disclose how they intend to respond to the risks their businesses and customers face from increasingly severe storms and wildfires, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change, California?s commissioner said Wednesday ...

California, which has the ninth-largest economy in the world, has led the way on this push to make a traditionally backward-looking industry anticipate and respond to the business liability presented by a changing climate. These new state regulations will focus attention on the insurance industry?s role in mediating the country?s response to climate change.

Any insurance company worth its salt will already have begun analyzing the risks posed by a warming climate. In 2011 alone we saw freak snowstorms, unruly flooding, and a record-breaking heatwave in Texas. And with the world continuing upon a trajectory of increased carbon emissions, scientists agree that such events will only become more common in the future.

Brad Johnson hammers that point home, noting that the "science that is of utmost important for the insurance industry to embrace is that these long-term trends are accelerating with the exponential increase in fossil fuel burning. Insurance models based on the assumption of a stable climate, using historical averages, are dangerously wrong."

Some scientists believe that there's enough empirical evidence to begin linking some weather events directly to climate change?a practice most have shied away from in the past. But climatologists like Dr. James Hansen has issued a report arguing that both the record-breaking Moscow heat wave of 2010 and the epic Texas drought last year would not have occurred if it weren't for global warming.

Perhaps the prospect of straight-up "climate change insurance" isn't far away ...

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/green-investments/us-insurance-must-now-get-serious-about-assessing-climate-change-risks.html

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