One after another, the hurricanes rumbled through: Harvey, Irma, Maria, Nate.
Each new storm during the tumultuous hurricane season of 2017 served as a reminder not only of the expensive and often tragic realities wrought by climate change, but also of the glaring need in the property/casualty insurance world to find a sustainable formula for financing disaster risk — one that protects the interests of insurance companies, government agencies and, of course, the people and businesses whose lives and property are threatened by natural disasters.
In the first nine months of 2017 alone, the United States experienced $15 billion weather and climate disasters, just shy of the record set in 2011, according to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2017). The recent spate of storms underscored the fundamental shortcomings of the current approach to financing disaster risk in the U.S., and particularly those of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the debt-ridden federal program that is currently up for reauthorization by the U.S. Congress.
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