Insurance Industry Paying $50 Billion/Yr In Weather Losses, Doubling Every Decade Since 80s
Paying out billions of dollars here and billions of dollars there has made the global insurance industry a believer in climate change, according to a new study that shows insurance companies are staunch advocates for reducing carbon emissions and minimizing the risk posed by increasingly severe weather events.
“Climate change stands as a stress test for insurance, the world’s largest industry with U.S. $4.6 trillion in revenues, 7% of the global economy,” writes Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the UC Berkeley campus.
The industry now pays an average of $50 billion a year in weather- and climate-related insurance losses, including property damage and business disruptions, Mills writes in a policy forum article in the journal Science. Such claims have been doubling every decade since the 1980s.
Superstorm Sandy, which ravaged the Eastern Seaboard, is just one recent example of the kinds of increasing liability posed by severe weather events in a changing climate, Evans said.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-climate-change-that-you-can-believe-in-20121213,0,2503364.story?track=rss
