Risky Science Podcast · Risk Market News

Climate, Markets and the Limits of Insurability with Dave Jones

·52 min·3 clips

Jones says insurers will face “an uninsurable future” unless emissions bend the temperature curve.

1. Risky Science Podcast centers on climate change, insurance availability, and the limits of insurability. 2. Host Chris Westfall interviews Dave Jones, former California insurance commissioner and current director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley Law, whose Yale Law Journal article drives the discussion. 3. The episode asks whether insurance is becoming the clearest early warning signal of climate risk and whether short-term policy fixes can hold the market together. 4. Jones says he served eight years as California’s insurance commissioner from 2011 through 2018, regulating the largest insurance market in the United States and the fifth or sixth largest in the world. 5. He describes two and a half years at the Nature Conservancy working with insurers on nature-based risk reduction and model pricing. 6. Jones says insured global NatCat losses were about $147 billion last year, about 29% above the rolling 10-year average. 7. He also says U.S. insured NatCat losses were about $114 billion and that insurers are paying ever larger claims. 8. He argues that rising temperatures are driving more severe and frequent weather-related catastrophes that destroy communities, injure people, and damage property. 9. Jones says California and Florida are the two case studies for how markets and regulators are responding to climate-linked insurance stress. 10. He says California’s market has seen more than 600,000 additional policyholders on the FAIR Plan since 2018. 11. Jones argues that more public and private investment in adaptation and resilience is needed, including home hardening, better building codes, fuel reduction, and prescribed fire. 12. He cites the U.S. Medical Survey study after Superstorm Sandy, saying intact salt marshes along the Atlantic coast avoided about $600 million in storm-surge losses. 13. Jones says Colorado enacted House Bill 1182, sponsored by Insurance Commissioner Mike Conway, to require insurers to account for property-, community-, and landscape-scale mitigation in their models. 14. He says California changed its rules to allow forward-looking probabilistic models for catastrophe loads, include reinsurance costs in rates, and limit FAIR Plan exposure to $500 million. 15. Jones says several insurers announced they would start writing new customers after those changes, but recent reviews found little additional coverage in high wildfire-risk areas. 16. He says Florida has lowered standards by relying on a less rigorous rating agency, limiting consumer claim challenges, and backing away from strong oversight. 17. Jones says the episode’s tone is policy-oriented and technical, with detailed discussion of rate regulation, reinsurance, mitigation standards, and residual markets. 18. Westfall and Jones use a question-and-answer format that moves from broad climate risk to California, Florida, and federal policy options. 19. Listeners interested in insurance regulation, wildfire risk, and climate policy will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners wanting a light or non-technical discussion of climate change may skip it.

As heard by us

Insurance stops feeling abstract once climate risk reaches renewal decisions.

This episode treats climate risk as something that shows up on an insurance balance sheet, not as a distant abstraction. Dave Jones argues that property insurance is already one of the clearest early warnings, and the discussion works best when it gets into residual markets,…

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When you want climate risk explained through insurance, not slogans.

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