In October, FM, an industrial and commercial mutual insurance company, announced $400 million in credits for existing policyholders to improve resilience and increase renewable energy use. The resilience credit was FM’s third in three years, providing a total of over $1 billion in premiums offsets to help clients protect their businesses against natural hazards. Insurance for Good sat down with Joe Dimitriadis, Vice President and Client Service Manager at FM, to hear more.

Insurance for Good and CA FWD are launching a new partnership to develop durable funding and financing models for resilience. This work was launched with a joint dialogue that highlighted the resilience imperative and the tight link between risk levels and insurance market outcomes. Carolyn Kousky and Nuin-Tara Key share their takeaways.

An innovative insurance product was recently piloted in Truckee, California. The Nature Conservancy, Willis Towers Watson, and the Climate Risk Initiative at the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment collaborated on an effort to help insurance take account of nature-based efforts to lower wildfire risk. Insurance for Good sat down with Dave Jones, the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative, to discuss the wildfire resilience insurance product written for a community in the forest.

Insurance for Good partnered with Headwaters Economics to answer three questions: (1) How much economic loss could be avoided by building homes to wildfire-resistant standards? (2) What level of financial investment is needed to build wildfire-resistant homes following disasters? And (3) What types of programs could help homeowners afford the necessary upgrades?

Photo Credit: Steve Rondeau, Nature Resources Director for the Klamath Tribes. Prescribed fire is an essential part of reducing risk from catastrophic wildfires and improving ecosystem health. One of the barriers to expanding use of this important tool is the availability and cost of prescribed fire liability insurance, which has become increasingly harder to get.

State residual insurance markets have many tools to help lower the risk of disaster damages to their policyholders. This table summarizes the approaches taken by select programs.

Carolyn Kousky shares policy recommendations to reform the California insurance market with the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery. Her suggestions focus on creating insurable communities and inclusive insurance systems.

Image: Isleton, California in 2024. (Alysha Beck/UC Davis) As many communities, small and large, face ongoing and increasing risk of flooding, new approaches to help residents prepare and recover are becoming increasingly important. The City of Isleton, CA is taking an innovative approach.

To better protect itself and ensure a faster recovery, Puerto Rico, in partnership with FEMA, has taken a bold step by securing a parametric insurance policy as another tool in the toolbox to support pre- and post-disaster hurricane and earthquake recovery efforts.

We summarize the dynamics in the California insurance market that have been unfolding through six sets of graphs, providing context for the current insurance issues facing the state as recovery begins.

In the United States, buildings account for more than a third of national CO2 emissions and many buildings are not able to withstand the impacts of future climate extremes. As the risks of climate disasters grow, our buildings require updates to decarbonize and improve energy efficiency and better protect inhabitants from intensifying weather-related events.

Amid inflation, high housing costs, and myriad day-to-day challenges, telling households that are already living on the edge, that they need to invest in emergency savings and disaster insurance coverage can often feel like a non-starter, but it is critical as an industry that we at minimum fix misconceptions, so households can make informed decisions.  

Insurance for Good is a foundation for positive change, for improved risk management, and a platform to adapt and reinvent risk transfer to work in a changing, and increasingly challenging, environment. We need to build risk solutions that can promote an equitable, resilient, climate-friendly, and nature-positive future.