The California residential property insurance market has been under stress recently due to a combination of growing wildfire risk, prior regulatory restrictions, and recent macroeconomic challenges since the pandemic. The insurance dislocation has been largely limited to the highest risk areas of the state, with the rest of the market remaining healthy. In this post, we unpack recent trends in the state’s residential property insurance market.

Invasive plants can transform landscapes into continuous, highly flammable fuel beds, increasing how readily wildfires ignite and spread. The models and management systems used to assess wildfire risk were not built to capture these invasion-driven changes, meaning their effects are not always fully reflected in risk estimates or management priorities. This piece examines how invasive species shape wildfire risk, and how better integrating invasive species into wildfire modeling and fuel management could help communities target risk-reduction investments more effectively.

The foundation of insurance lies in the pooling and diversification of risk. This post illustrates how risk pooling and diversification, when achieved, translate into lower premiums for policyholders. We explain why these are critical to a well-functioning insurance market.

This is the first post in a series about drivers of pricing and availability in property insurance markets in the United States. An often underappreciated driver of premiums is the cost of construction, which is influenced by many macroeconomic factors. In recent years construction costs have risen substantially due to a confluence of compounding pressures.

This is the fifth installment in a blog series from CA FWD and Insurance for Good. This blog summarizes key themes from recent discussions by the expert workgroup convened through the partnership.

Growth in the FAIR plan has been substantial since 2018 and only recently, in the last quarter of 2025, has shown signs of slowing. This post explores how the growth in policies have varied by wildfire risk level and geography.

This is the fourth installment in a blog series from CA FWD and Insurance for Good. This guest contribution from PRE Collective covers how and why resilience finance begins with predevelopment.

This is the third installment in a blog series from CA FWD and Insurance for Good. This post outlines that California cannot keep pace with the costs of climate risk without a more stable and sustained approach to resilience investment.

Insurance for Good and the California Department of Housing and Community Development are pleased to announce the launch of the Insurance Resilience Planning Program (IRPP), in close coordination with the California Department of Insurance. Learn more about this partnership and new program for eligible communities in California.

Insurers manage a large amount of investments – nearly $9 trillion in the US alone. Our new blog explores how California and Massachusetts have encouraged insurers to invest in social and environmentally-friendly projects.  The California Organized Investment Network (COIN) uses a voluntary approach to connect insurers to low-income and rural community development projects,. In Massachusetts, the Life Initiative (TLI) and the Property & Casualty Insurance Fund (PCI) directly invest insurer capital to provide early-stage funding to community development projects that might otherwise not attract sufficient investment.

The community of Belle Air in San Bruno, California has a long history of flooding. To address this threat, a team of community partners led by OneShoreline, a regional government agency, is empowering residents through a low-cost, household-level approach to flood resilience. By reducing the impacts of chronic flooding at both this household scale and at the community scale, OneShoreline is working to lower uninsured flood losses.

This is the second installment in a blog series from CA FWD and Insurance for Good. This post outlines the challenges of realigning responsibility, incentives, and investment so that resilience becomes the logical—not the exceptional—investment.

This is the first installment in a blog series from CA FWD and Insurance for Good. This blog summarizes the key themes coming from recent discussions by the expert workgroup convened through the partnership.

In 2022, California implemented regulations requiring homeowners insurers to adopt premium discounts for policyholders who take steps to lower the risk of a wildfire burning their home. In this essay, we examine how California insurers have responded to these new regulations and summarize the premium reductions available currently in the California market. If homeowners adopt both the maximum home hardening upgrades and defensible space, the greatest premium discount they will receive varies from only a few percent to over 40 percent depending on the insurer and the loss reduction standards adopted.

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.