This is why reinsurers focus so intensely on climate change. Take a glance at the websites of big ones like Swiss Re and Munich Re and you get a sense of how central this is to their calculations – a concern that has spread to property insurers who are starting to hire climate consultants. Even more than market volatility, climate is their biggest headache. ‘You won’t meet a single insurance or reinsurance CEO who doesn’t believe in climate change,’ the insurance investor and former Lombard Insurance CEO James Orford told me. ‘They see it in the numbers – a combination of more extreme, less predictable events, combined with big losses of sums insured. All the modelling suggests these are uninsurable risks.’
Insurance is basically a form of gambling and the companies are the house, calculating the odds and taking a cut. Nothing is uninsurable, you just need to set the odds appropriately, perhaps it becomes very expensive, or gasp, unprofitable. Prices are going up because climate change is changing the odds. The problems arise when it is profitable to increase prices further than necessary and to deny claims whenever possible, and people have rightly become distrustful.
There is a solid case for taking profit out of the equation and nationalizing.
reading this related article yesterday, the Australian Government already underwrites risk up to $10 Billiion. It’s not enough and it can never be enough because Northern Australia will be even more unlivable then now as the decades roll on.
North of Gympie should start undergoing managed abandonment but here we are.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-03/north-queensland-flooding-sure-insurance-delays/106330458
In the year since flood waters inundated their lush north Queensland property they have travelled thousands of kilometres across state borders to stay with family and friends — facing repeated delays to insurance repairs on their flood-damaged home.
Home insurance premiums have increased by 51 per cent in the past five years, according to data analytics firm Finity.
Insurance is still about covering costs … northern Australia is exposed to very high climate risk," Dr Settle said.
the irony is, this in the state that elected climate deniers… :) can’t make this shit up.
Maybe we could start by abolishing the institute of leeches called “insurance industry”? 🤔
That would accomplish nothing, it would in fact be counter productive and lead to more chaos, faster.
It’s them who are now finally forcing actual reality on the ground to be reflected through increased costs, after decades of everyone else failing to build and adapt infrastructure to prevent the current crisis.
You can’t have any kind of an economic system without some kind of an incentive structure, and right now, they’re the only part of the current system that is even kind of functioning correctly, in line with reality.
They’re where the buck stops.
They’re actually assigning cost to climate change, instead of just doing carbon credit type bullshit, as most world governments have done, which basically amounts to giving away taxpayer money to whoever can figure out how to game that system most effectively.
Remove that, and well, everything falls apart rather quickly.
You are aware that insurers and insurance very often exists because it is legally mandated for all sorts of endeavors to have some kind of insurance, right?
World trade would basically cease, as every aircraft and ship and truck and train that moves stuff … would stop doing that.
And then everyone but the hyper wealthy starve to death.
Please actually read the article.
What can actually be done, that is productive and useful?
The article ends with:
Governments can take action in other ways, by investing greater sums in risk-prevention and management. There are signs of this happening such as the ‘fire-hardening’ and storm-prevention efforts in Florida, and improved flood defences in the UK; meanwhile, the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility is being used in several countries to build and renovate operations centres to cope with wildfires, and to buy firefighting helicopters.
In future, it is likely that voters will demand that their state and national governments do far more, regardless of the cost. They will want tougher building codes, including limitations on building in risky areas; expensive fire-prevention and fire-fighting schemes; better flood and storm defences; improved early catastrophe management, involving relocating people from risky areas and, when disaster strikes, rapid life-saving interventions such as large-scale emergency evacuations. If the insurance industry is forced to retreat by the climate crisis, all of this infrastructural investment will require vast chunks of taxpayers’ money. It is hard to avoid the feeling that this is part of our destiny, and that the sore thumb of the Florida peninsula is pointing us to the future.
That’s the top down approach, basically.
Another approach is bottom up:
Become as self-sufficient as you can, for as many things as you can.
Have a back-up water supply, get a small home solar power bank, do what climate related shoring up of your home that you can do, figure out how to reduce your overall power and water usage…
Unironically learn how to cook from closer to raw materials, maintain a pantry of shelf stable stuff in case food prices spike or their logistics that get them to the grocery store fails, figure out how to move yourself around town in a more rugged way that’s less reliant on complex supply chains…
Learn how to repair and maintain what you have, instead of replacing everything with built-to-break bs.
If you get a whole mass of people doing that… strain on the overall system lessens somewhat, capacity to recover from a local or regional disaster, resiliance, improves somewhat.
At a kind of midpoint level… reorient economies from being global, to being regional.
You still have supply lines and logistics, you still have trade, but its a bit less of an overall selection, with significantly less distant logistical hops.
Reform land use policies to incentivize local agriculture or industry to be able to pop up to fill the gaps from the pivot away from global supply lines: source everything that you can as locally as you can, and when you can’t find a local source, actually invest in building one.
Shorter supply lines = less fuel burned = less CO2 = less climate change.
