Insurers confirm growing risks of climate change – ‘The trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear’
Stakeholders from the insurance industry met with members of the U.S. Senate to acknowledge the role global warming plays in extreme weather-related losses, and to issue a call for action. By Pat Speer, Insurance Networking News
2 March 2012 The politics of global warming have typically involved much debate as to the role climate change plays in growing weather-related risk. Yesterday, however, at a Capital Hill a press conference on the cost of climate change, debate was not on the agenda. Pointing to a year of history-making, $1 billion-plus natural disasters, representatives of Tier 1 insurance companies took a definitive stance with members of the U.S. Senate to confirm that costs to taxpayers and businesses from extreme weather will continue to soar because of climate change. Representatives from The Reinsurance Association of America, Swiss Re and Willis Re, and Ceres, a nonprofit organization that leads a national coalition of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies to address a variety of sustainability challenges, joined Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) yesterday to discuss the growing financial impact of global warming. “From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.” Property and casualty insurers in the United States experienced an estimated $44 billion in losses last year when hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, and other natural disasters were more severe, longer, more frequent, and less predictable than in the past. According to Swiss Re, the average weather-related insurance industry loss in the U.S. was about $3 billion a year in the 1980s compared to approximately $20 billion annually by the end of the past decade. “As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re’s sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.” […] “Perhaps no industry better understands the impact of global warming than the insurance industry whose job it is to analyze risk,” Sanders said. “I am pleased leaders in that industry are speaking out about the need to reverse global warming.” Added Whitehouse, “Extreme weather events, like Rhode Island’s historic floods in 2010, can result in the loss of homes, livelihoods, and even lives. These extreme events fit a pattern predicted by climate scientists, and we should take action now to minimize the damage that carbon pollution is causing to our country and our world.” […]
Climate Change: Insurers Confirm Growing Risks, Costs via The Oil Drum
This is huge. Let's see the deniers argue with the insurance companies! Contrast to their attitude emailed to me in January 2011 from MunichRe:
At present time it is still very difficult to evaluate the true proportions of how much of the loss trends are driven by these socio-economic developments and how much is driven by a (meteorologically proven) increase in strong thunder storm events in certain areas. In fact we are doing research on this issue in a cooperation together with the London School of Economics, London, UK. So far it remains clear, too, that the majority of the trend drivers has to be attributed to the socio-economic factors and not to climate change. However, we also see certain trends growing faster than the socio-economic developments which – in a very speculative way! – allows the interpretation that climate change or (at least) variability in climate has an impact on our historic loss data.