Executive Summary
This post introduces the Extreme Weather Events and Insurance webinar series from the National Academies, focusing on how rising losses from wildfires, floods, winter storms, and other extreme weather events are straining the U.S. insurance and disaster recovery system. It explores how insurance, alongside land-use planning, infrastructure investment, and community-level adaptation, can function as a form of climate change adaptation and risk management for households, communities, and the broader economy.
Extreme Weather Events And Insurance As Climate Adaptation
Financial losses from extreme weather events are rising rapidly, placing a growing strain on the U.S. insurance and disaster recovery system. Floods, wildfires, hurricanes, winter storms, heat waves, and severe convective storms are no longer rare once-in-a-century events. They are recurring climate-driven shocks that ripple through households, businesses, infrastructure networks, and public budgets across the country.
Shared Climate Risk Across The Insurance And Recovery System
Insurers, state and local governments, federal agencies, and a wide range of actors, including homeowners, utilities, and infrastructure managers, all absorb some portion of the risk of loss due to extreme weather. Together, they form an extensive but increasingly fragile insurance and recovery system. As climate-related losses escalate, this system is becoming financially unsustainable and less able to respond effectively to today’s risk landscape.
Economic Fixes Versus Real-World Complexity
On paper, the way to repair the insurance system can look like a straightforward economic exercise, such as adjusting premiums, refining catastrophe risk models, tightening underwriting criteria, increasing reserves, or expanding public subsidies. In practice, however, the range of responses to how to share and mitigate climate risk is driven by a complex mix of business interests, household economics, individual risk perceptions and tolerances, regulatory frameworks, and shared community attitudes toward fairness, responsibility, and long-term resilience.
Purpose Of The Extreme Weather Events And Insurance Webinar Series
The Extreme Weather Events and Insurance webinar series will examine these challenges in depth. Financial losses due to extreme weather events such as wildfires, floods, and winter storms are increasing, and the insurance and recovery system in the United States is increasingly unable to respond effectively to the current risk landscape. Business interests, household economics, individual risk perception and tolerance, and community attitudes will all shape how the nation moves forward. This series will summarize the growing body of scientific research on these issues, examine it in the current context of escalating climate risk and compounding losses, and identify areas of further study as potential ways forward.
Aligning Science, Policy, And Practice For Climate Risk Management
By bringing together experts from science, policy, industry, and community perspectives, the series will explore how the insurance and recovery system is evolving under climate pressure, where it is under the most stress, and how both public and private actors can better align incentives around resilience, risk reduction, and climate adaptation.
Traditional Insurance Assumptions Under Climate Stress
The traditional insurance model assumes that risks are relatively stable over time and geographically diverse, allowing losses in one region or year to be offset by quieter periods in the other areas or years. Climate change is eroding those assumptions. Larger, more frequent, and more severe events can lead to back-to-back losses that cluster in places where people, property, and infrastructure are most exposed to hazards such as fire, flood, and wind.
Impacts On Households, Affordability, And Community Equity
As payouts grow, insurers may respond by increasing premiums, narrowing coverage, raising deductibles, or exiting high-risk markets altogether. That leaves households and communities facing difficult choices, such as paying more for coverage, accepting higher levels of risk, or going without insurance entirely. For lower-income families and vulnerable communities, these choices can deepen existing inequities, increase vulnerability, and make recovery from disaster even harder.
Limits Of Disaster Aid And The Need For Proactive Resilience
Public programs and disaster aid aim to fill some of these gaps, but they, too, are under pressure from rising climate losses. Rebuilding after each disaster is expensive and time-consuming, and often fails to address underlying vulnerabilities in housing, infrastructure, and land-use patterns. Without a stronger focus on proactive resilience and adaptation, recovery efforts can unintentionally set the stage for repeated cycles of damage, displacement, and loss.
Insurance As A Proactive Form Of Climate Adaptation
The final event in the series will focus on insurance more broadly as a form of adaptation to climate change. Rather than seeing insurance solely as a financial product that steps in after losses occur, this conversation will consider how insurance can help shape behavior, guide investment, and incentivize risk reduction before disasters strike. Speakers will discuss the limits of insurance in distributing and reducing risk and what true resilience means for individuals and communities facing increasing exposure to climate extremes. The session will examine the core elements of the insurance business model, its potential role as an adaptation tool, and its constraints when climate risks become too concentrated, too frequent, or too severe.
Key Questions On Insurance, Adaptation, And A Safer Future
Key questions include what the limits of the idea of insurance as adaptation are and where the real opportunities lie in using insurance to support climate resilience. The discussion will explore how a broader range of actions, including insurance, land-use planning, building standards, infrastructure investment, nature-based solutions, and social safety nets, can be configured to create a safer and more climate-resilient world. The webinar will also address alternative ways to manage risk in areas where insurance is no longer available, affordable, or sufficient, particularly for those who would be most affected by the loss of coverage.
Beyond Insurance: Complementary Tools For Climate And Disaster Risk Management
In many regions, insurers are already reducing their presence in high-risk areas, leaving governments, utilities, and property owners to bear a greater share of the financial burden associated with climate-related disasters. The webinar will explore complementary tools such as risk pools, public–private partnerships, resilience bonds, stronger building codes, targeted buyouts, and community-driven adaptation strategies. Together, these approaches can help shift the focus from repeatedly financing recovery to proactively investing in measures that reduce losses, protect lives and livelihoods, and support long-term community stability. By reframing insurance as one piece of a broader climate adaptation toolkit, policymakers and practitioners can better align financial incentives with climate resilience and disaster risk reduction.
Featured Experts And Perspectives On Climate And Insurance
The event will feature Carolyn Kousky, Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy Analysis at the Environmental Defense Fund, Jason Thistlethwaite, Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development at the University of Waterloo, and Mark Bove, Natural Catastrophe Solutions Manager at Munich Reinsurance America, Inc. The discussion will be moderated by Adelle Thomas, Senior Director for Climate Adaptation, Environmental Health, and Natural Resources at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Pathways Toward A More Resilient And Insurable Future
Together, these experts will examine how insurance systems are evolving in response to climate change, where current models fall short, and what a more resilient and adaptive risk framework could look like for individuals, communities, and the broader economy. This webinar offers a timely opportunity for policymakers, practitioners, researchers, community leaders, and concerned citizens to better understand the complex relationship between extreme weather, insurance, and climate adaptation, and to explore practical pathways toward a more resilient and insurable future.
© 2025 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
(Source: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2025). Extreme weather events and insurance: Insurance as adaptation [Webinar]. Retrieved from www.nationalacademies.org/projects/CHPP-ESR-25-P-717/event/46082.)
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