In Counties In Top 20% For Climate Risks, Home Insurance Premiums Rose 22% In 3 Years

Concern over the climate crisis may evaporate in the White House from January, but its financial costs are now starkly apparent to Americans in the form of soaring home insurance premiums – with those in the riskiest areas for floods, storms and wildfires suffering the steepest rises of all. A mounting toll of severe hurricanes, floods, fires and other extreme events has caused average premiums to leap since 2020, with parts of the US most prone to disasters bearing the brunt. A climate crisis is starting to stir an insurance crisis.

Across all US counties, those in the top fifth for climate-driven disaster risk saw home premiums leap by 22% in just three years to 2023, compared to an overall average of a 13% rise in real terms, research of mortgage payment data has found. The Guardian has analyzed the study’s data to illustrate the places in the US at highest risk from disasters and insurance hikes.

“This has been the canary in the climate coalmine, and it’s now hitting households’ pocketbooks,” said Ben Keys, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and co-author of the research. “You can deny climate change for whatever motivations you have but when insurance is going up because you live in a risky area, that’s hard to deny.” Keys said there is a “tight correlation” between premium rises and counties deemed most at risk from a metric drawn from past disasters combined with modeling of future events exacerbated by the climate crisis.

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If there is an epicenter of disaster risk and ballooning insurance in the US, it’s to be found along the Gulf of Mexico coast and, in particular, Florida, the state where home insurance costs more than $11,000 a year on average, surging by 42% just in 2023. “Florida is a creature unto itself,” said Keys. “It has had so many waves of storms and insurers going bust that the risk exposure is kind of staggering.” More than a dozen insurers have left Florida in the past seven years amid a stampede of disasters, placing strain upon a state-supported backstop insurance system that is now “not solvent” according to Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. DeSantis has opted to pretend a key driver of this problem doesn’t exist, deleting mention of climate change from state law in May. Donald Trump is similarly expected to remove climate considerations from US government agencies and federally-backed projects that face higher risks because of climate change.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-crisis-insurance-premiums