In June 2023, along with fellow graduate students, Hannah Friedrich (University of Arizona) and Emmalina Glinskis (University of California Berkeley), I co-hosted a panel session at the Columbia Climate School’s Managed Retreat Conference, “At What Point Managed Retreat?: Habitability and Mobility in an Era of Climate Change”.
Our session, “An Early Career Panel on the Limits and Reforms of Insurance under Shifting Climate Risk” provided a platform for early career researchers to voice their perspectives on the direction of potential insurance reform in light of growing pressures on insurance programs in the US and around the world. Our panel of experts - which featured Jacob Bradt (Harvard Kennedy School), Ian Gray (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS)), Clay Kerchof (California Department of Housing & Community Development) and Rachel Young (Princeton) - discussed issues including misratings and rising debts in the US National Flood Insurance Program, and the exodous of private insurance companies across much of the West Coast and US Gulf Coast following recent major wildfires and coastal storms.
The multi-disciplinary panel offered insights across the interwoven fabric of insurance, housing, relocation, buyouts, real estate and public-private sector interactions. What actions are insurers and governments taking to promote risk reduction or adaptation practices that reduce residual risk to be subsequently transferred or retained? How can this be reconciled with individual perspectives on risk, affordability, and community development and cohesion precisely in underserved frontlines of climate change? To what extent does the health of insurance markets reverberate through the broader property market? How can new technologies facilitate better and more equitable risk coverage while identifying and addressing critical protection gaps?
Whilst there is no silver bullet for these issues, it is clear that interdisciplinary efforts are critical to finding solutions that do the most good for the most people. We look forward to revisiting these and newly arisen questions at the next Managed Retreat Conference in 2025.
