The Uninsurable Future: The Climate Threat to Property Insurance, and How to Stop It

Dave Jones, Director of CLEE’s Climate Risk Initiative and former California Insurance Commissioner, published an essay in The Yale Law Journal Forum outlining the climate change-driven crisis facing the U.S. insurance industry, with increasingly extreme catastrophes leading to coverage withdrawals, premium increases, and long-term destabilization of the market. Jones analyzes recent regulatory responses in California and Florida before proposing a suite of reforms in state insurance regulation, land use reforms, federal reinsurance for residual markets/FAIR Plans, and requiring insurers to transition from investments in and writing insurance for the fossil fuel industry: “The only long-term solution to preserve an insurable future is to transition from fossil fuels and other greenhouse-gas-emitting industries.”