In the first 8 months of 2023, the United States experienced 23 separate billion-dollar climate and weather disasters – a new, unfortunate record. In response to the increasing frequency of these weather events, as well as looking ahead at the long-term effects of climate change, the White House released a National Climate Resilience Framework at the end of September.

The framework identifies six core objectives that aim to strengthen the U.S. against the effects of climate change. These six objectives are:

• To embed climate resilience into planning and management.
• To increase resilience of the built environment to both acute climate shocks and chronic stressors.
• To mobilize capital, investment and innovation to advance climate resilience at scale.
• To equip communities with information and resources needed to assess their climate risks and develop the climate resilience solutions most appropriate for them.
• To protect and sustainably manage lands and waters to enhance resilience while providing numerous other benefits.
• And to help communities become not only more resilient, but also more safe, healthy, equitable and economically strong.

The framework also directly references the role that property and casualty insurance has to play in climate risk resiliency. To break down what that role really looks like, we were joined for this episode of the Insurance Speak podcast by Charlie Sidoti, the executive director of InnSure.

When asked about his takeaways from the National Climate Resilience Framework as someone in the insurance industry, Sidoti said: "I think the biggest takeaway is that they are really leaning into the whole issue of resilience, and insurance is a big part of it… But on a high level, it's really about innovating around how to make communities more physically resilient so that the losses are smaller; but also the most vulnerable populations, how they can be more financially resilient so that when impacts do occur, they don't necessarily end up on the backs of the communities that really can't respond to them financially. So in our mind, it's all about innovation and using innovation to drive both that physical resilience and financial resilience, which is in everybody's interest, including the insurance industry."