Corporate roundtable presentation focuses on climate risk

The Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois illustrates how beautiful planet Earth can be, and it has done so since it opened 50 years ago. That’s why the stewards of the garden are intent on ensuring the beauty our planet offers is not altered by climate change.

It’s also why Zurich North America Climate Director David Edsey was a natural fit to speak at the garden’s Corporate Roundtable on Sustainability on April 25. His presentation was titled, “Climate Change and the Insurance Industry.” 

Edsey dove right into the topic, listing extreme weather events, our ecosystems, biodiversity, rising sea levels and our food supply as being negatively impacted by climate change. “The world is still insurable with a two degrees Celsius rise in global warming,” he said. “But if it gets nearer to four degrees, it becomes a huge question mark for all of us.”

The number of billion-dollar disasters continues to rise as more people move closer to areas affected by severe weather, like the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and regions in the West prone to wildfires, Edsey said.

There were 31 billion-dollar events in the United States from 1980-89, including heatwave, floods, hurricanes/cyclones, droughts, convective storms and wildfires. From 2013 to 2022, that number skyrocketed to 151 billion-dollar events. (Numbers are adjusted for inflation.)

“In a nutshell, high-risk areas continue to attract development,” Edsey said. “People want to live by the water and the woods.”

For example, online residential real estate brokerage Redfin found that from 2016 to 2020, more people moved to high-risk areas such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and Nevada than to low-risk areas. Ten million properties in the U.S. face major to extreme wildfire risk, and one in 12 homes in California is at high risk of burning.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea levels are projected to rise 10-12 inches along U.S. coastlines in the next 30 years, and that’s in addition to the almost eight inches of sea level rise we’ve already seen.

Edsey also talked about insurance protection gaps, government-subsidized insurance plans such as the National Flood Insurance Plan, more hurricane-resilient building codes in states such as Florida and the Carolinas, and the detrimental effect on communities when insurance becomes unavailable or unaffordable.