Collaborating Across Sectors to Address the Property Insurability Crisis
Our Vision
A future in which property insurance helps communities equitably adapt to climate change – by incentivizing risk mitigation, and ensuring that people and businesses can recover from losses.
Our Mission
We bring together people from all sides of the property insurance crisis to co-develop strategies that leverage insurance as a tool for building a more resilient future.
Complex Challenges Require Polycentric Strategies
Climate change is intensifying natural hazards – like storms, wildfires, and flooding – that devastate communities, inflict large-scale losses on insurers and, in turn, drive up the costs of property insurance and reinsurance.
As disasters become more frequent and severe, people need insurance more than ever. But property insurance is increasingly unaffordable or even unavailable.
While insurance premiums are soaring to reflect the cost of increasing risk, the insurance industry does not yet consistently factor the benefits of resilience investments into premiums.
This crisis is driving down property values for homeowners, while also making it harder to develop new affordable housing. And underinsurance for climate hazards means that banks and lenders have taken on greater-than-anticipated risk across the mortgages in their portfolios.
This systemic hazard to both local communities and the global economy seems to echo the 2008 financial crisis – while threatening our ability to mobilize resources to transition to a more resilient future.
There is no one actor or solution that can solve this problem. The only way out of this crisis is to work our way through it – together. We’ll have to reimagine the roles and responsibilities of governments, insurance companies, community institutions, and more. It’s time to get started.