NAIC targets coverage gaps with national climate strategy
The climate strategy was developed under the coordination of the NAIC's Climate and Resiliency Task Force.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has adopted the first National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance, which exists with the goal of reducing losses and speeding recovery from natural disasters and addressing coverage gaps.
“Closing the protection gap means hardening properties and continuing to vigorously monitor solvency protection oversight,” NAIC President and Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Andrew N. Mais said in a release. “As insurance regulators are seeing in our states and territories, this is a national problem that calls for a national strategy to ensure that insurance remains available and reliable.”
A main component of this strategy is the states’ Property & Casualty Market Intelligence Data Call (PCMI), which will gather data from more than 400 property insurers to give insurance regulators a clear look at what is happening in local property markets and the overall U.S. market. This data, NAIC says, will cover more than 80% of the U.S. property insurance market by premium.
Letters about the PCMI were sent to property insurers on March 8, and the data is due by June 6. The PCMI data template reportedly asks insurers to submit ZIP code-level data on more than 70 data points, including premiums, policies, claims, losses, limits, deductibles, non-renewals and coverage types.
Overall, the NAIC’s strategy addresses state insurance regulators’ plans to:
- Create data to help identify and close protection gaps
- Create a blueprint for the future of flood insurance
- Leverage information and tools from the NAIC’s Catastrophe Modeling Center of Excellence
- Create new resilience tools
- Advocate for pre-disaster mitigation funding
- Improve solvency tools
“Our property markets and the consumers we work to protect are under pressure. The PCMI data call and the National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance will help us close protection gaps and make every community stronger and more resilient,” Alaska Division of Insurance Director Lori K. Wing-Heier said in a release. “This strategy document brings together many of our existing workstreams, focuses our work on pre-disaster risk mitigation, and will provide important coordination among U.S. state regulators.”
The full draft of the NAIC’s National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance can be found here.