Evan Mills, Eugene Lecomte and Andrew Peara
Environmental Energy Technologies Division
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
University of California
1 Cyclotron Rd, Berkeley, California, USA
LBNL Report #45185
February 2001
This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098 and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Atmospheric Programs.
Note: large document -- 5.5 MB
A limited number of hard copies are also available by request from Evan Mills.
This publication can be downloaded from this link and read using Adobe Acrobat.
To download just the Title Page, Table of Contents and Executive Summary, click here.
To download just the cover page, click here.
If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, get it here:
In this report we explore the disposition of the U.S. insurance community regarding the question of global climate change. To provide some context, we examine the history of insurance, insurance regulation, the role of government insurance and disaster relief, the relationship between insurer insolvencies and weather-related events, the emerging capital market alternatives to finance risk, and insurers? perception of and participation in climate science, and catastrophe modeling. While it is generally recognized that weather-related catastrophe losses have been rising dramatically in recent years, the role of climate change in past or future trends is a subject of much uncertainty for insurers. In any case, insurers and their constituents clearly have significant exposure and vulnerability to extreme weather events, and these exposures would rise under climate change. Our in-depth interviews with insurance executives and extensive review of the literature found that insurers have assumed positions on all points of the public policy compass. This report has been prepared in the spirit of fostering improved understanding and communication among the insurance and non-insurance communities, and perhaps a higher level of interaction than has been seen thus far.