Insurance and climate risks: Policy lessons from three bounding scenarios.

Climate change poses complex risks without precedent that challenge established planning and risk management tools, including property insurance. The nature and timing of transitions in markets and institutions in response to growing climate risks will shape prospects for future socioeconomic well-being. As property insurance markets in the United States face higher levels of turmoil, policymakers are weighing various interventions to stabilize not only insurance but also housing and mortgage markets.

Insurance-sector tools to combat biodiversity loss.

Risk transfer can facilitate nature-positive investments.

Can Parametric Microinsurance Improve the Financial Resilience of Low-Income Households in the United States?: A Proof-of-Concept Examination.

Natural disaster risk is escalating around the globe and in the United States. A large body of research has found that lower-income households disproportionally suffer from disasters and are less likely to recover. Poorer households often lack the financial resources for rebuilding, endangering other aspects of wellbeing.

Adapting our Flood Risk Policies to Changing Conditions.

Flooding causes more damage and severely impacts more people worldwide than any other natural disaster. Flood risk in many parts of the United States is projected to increase due to both continued floodplain development and climate change. Many of our institutions and public policies are not designed to address these changing risk conditions.

New insights into US flood vulnerability revealed from flood insurance big data.

Improvements in modelling power and input data have vastly improved the precision of physical flood models, but translation into economic outputs requires depth-damage functions that are inadequately verified. In particular, flood damage is widely assumed to increase monotonically with water depth. Here, we assess flood vulnerability in the US using >2 million claims from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

Disasters as Learning Experiences or Disasters as Policy Opportunities? Examining Flood Insurance Purchases after Hurricanes.

Flood insurance is a critical risk management strategy, contributing to greater resilience of individuals and communities. The occurrence of disasters has been observed to alter risk management choices, including the decision to insure. This has previously been explained by learning and behavioral biases.

Strategically placing green infrastructure: cost-effective land conservation in the floodplain.

Green infrastructure approaches have attracted increased attention from local governments as a way to lower flood risk and provide an array of other environmental services. The peer-reviewed literature, however, offers few estimates of the economic impacts of such approaches at the watershed scale. We estimate the avoided flood damages and the costs of preventing development of floodplain parcels in the East River Watershed of Wisconsin's Lower Fox River Basin.

The challenge of degraded environments: how common biases impair effective policy.

Economic activity can damage natural systems and reduce the flow of ecosystem services. The harms can be substantial, as our case studies vividly illustrate. Most degraded landscapes have at least some potential to be reclaimed.

Designing payments for ecosystem services: Lessons from previous experience with incentive-based mechanisms.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) policies compensate individuals or communities for undertaking actions that increase the provision of ecosystem services such as water purification, flood mitigation, or carbon sequestration. PES schemes rely on incentives to induce behavioral change and can thus be considered part of the broader class of incentive- or market-based mechanisms for environmental policy. By recognizing that PES programs are incentive-based, policymakers can draw on insights from the substantial body of accumulated knowledge about this class of instruments.