Reimagining Homeowners Insurance, with Carolyn Kousky

Notable Quotes

• Climate change is stressing insurance markets: “We’re seeing risks go up year on year on year, and that’s making insurability more difficult … We’re seeing places where events are becoming really frequent—think coastal tidal flooding—and events that happen many times a year. You can’t pay to insure those … On the other hand, we’re also seeing extreme events get even more extreme—record-breaking at the other end of the distribution, and that also is making it harder to provide insurance.” (15:25)
• Insurers have a role in building climate resilience: “Disasters are this huge tragedy, and yet, they’re also a time when our building stock gets turned over. And so, it seems to me that they also need to be considered a really important opportunity to build differently … With over 90 percent of American households having homeowners insurance, insurers have a natural role of providing better information to people about what measures they need to take, what changes they need to make, and potentially give them extra dollars to do those retrofits at the time of rebuilding.” (21:23)
• Public policies that improve resilience offer long-term benefits: “There’s this mistaken idea that building back safer means it’s going to take a really long time and a ton of money. I think we need to change that mentality and make sure that that’s not true—make sure that you can do it on the same timetable and that everyone understands that that’s lowering future losses and keeping people safer.” (23:35)

Top of the Stack

• Insurance for Good
• “Wildfire Insurance Availability as a Risk Signal” by Xuesong You, Carolyn Kousky, and Ajita Atreya
• Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun
• Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast for Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm your host, Margaret Walls. My guest today is Dr. Carolyn Kousky. Carolyn is associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. Her research focuses on multiple aspects of climate and disaster risk management and policies to advance resilience. She's a go-to expert, in my view, on issues related to disaster insurance, and she probably knows more than almost anyone about the National Flood Insurance Program.

Today, she's with us to talk about a new organization that she's founded called Insurance for Good. Insurance for Good is a nonprofit that's serving as a hub of people and institutions working together to harness risk transfer in support of social and environmental goals. Those goals include improving equity in disaster recovery, driving investments in resilience, accelerating the clean energy transition, and supporting nature-based solutions. So, it's a lot of different things, and we're going to learn more about these goals, how the new organization is working to achieve them, how Carolyn and her colleagues are engaging with private insurers and local communities and the public sector, and what the long-term vision is for insurance markets and policy that's motivating this new endeavor. Stay with us.

Hello, Carolyn, my good friend. Welcome to Resources Radio. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Carolyn Kousky: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be speaking with you.

Margaret Walls: I just said, before we started here, I'm really excited to talk to you today. You know Resources Radio. Before we do that, I want you to tell our listeners, if you could, a little bit about your background and your personal journey. Something about how you got into the field of environmental economics and especially these issues related to disasters and insurance.

Carolyn Kousky: Sure. Thanks, Margaret.

I got interested in environmental economics as an undergraduate. I cared a lot about environmental issues and environmental protection, and I thought that meant that I should be studying ecology. I majored in an interdisciplinary degree that required all the students to take a range of different courses; one of them was an introductory economics course. When I took that course, I realized this could be a really important tool for thinking about the environmental challenges we faced. So, that's what pivoted me into economics.

I didn't start thinking about disasters until I was a graduate student. I had been working on my dissertation, which was about the valuation of ecosystem services that people got from natural systems, when Hurricane Katrina hit. Because of that work I'd been doing on these benefits that ecosystems can provide, I was pulled into a project that was looking at the role of wetlands in buffering storm surge. That led me to thinking a lot about disaster response and recovery as that was unfolding after Katrina. As you know, there were a lot of challenges with the recovery from Katrina. So, that's what first got me fascinated with how we handle these extreme events. That's also what first got me into flood insurance, and everything just snowballed from there.

Margaret Walls: It certainly did. We're going to hear more about that. It's interesting how many of us in our field started in something like ecology and then pivoted. It's an interesting path.

The first question I'm going to ask you is a clarifying one I read from the website. What do you mean by “risk transfer”? This is a term that gets used a lot. I just want you to take a moment, define it for us, and make sure everybody understands what we mean by “risk transfer.”

Carolyn Kousky: Maybe it's too technical of a term, but I'm trying to popularize it, so I'm really glad you asked that.

Margaret Walls: Oh, good.

Carolyn Kousky: Risk transfer, as the name suggests, is when a risk is shifted from being held by one entity to another entity that's better able to take on that risk. Insurance is a really common type of risk transfer, where policyholders pay a fee—the premium—to have the insurance company take on that risk for them. In that way, insurance is, for most people, a type of income smoothing, where you pay a little bit in the good years so that you can get a payout in the bad years when you have a financial loss.

The reason I like to say and focus on risk transfer, and not just insurance, is that it can be much broader than that traditional mechanism. That includes, on the one hand, arrangements to share risk within a group. For example, you could look back in history at early bands of foragers that would pool the risk of food shortages by combining food together, which then enabled some members of the group to do more high-risk but high-reward activities, like hunting, when they knew there'd be other food available if the hunt wasn't successful. We still see cultures around the world that have developed these systems of reciprocity that are essentially risk-pooling mechanisms, so that if you have a big loss, it's shared with this wider group. That's one type of risk transfer that's not traditional insurance.

Another type of risk transfer on another end of the spectrum is risk transfer that includes instruments that will put risk into the financial markets. Those are things like, as some of your listeners might've heard of, catastrophe bonds or other types of similar financial tools. They're not technically insurance, either, but they're another way to transfer risk. And so, I like to think about that broader range of solutions, because there's times when it might not be the traditional insurance model that's the best approach.

Margaret Walls: That's a really great explanation. Thanks so much. I'll help you popularize that term.

Carolyn Kousky: Thank you.

Margaret Walls: I'll try to use it more myself.

So, Carolyn, you and I used to be colleagues at RFF. Those were the good old days.

Carolyn Kousky: Yes, they were.

Margaret Walls: You came to RFF fresh from your PhD and, gradually, I've watched your career blossom in many ways. It's been great to see. Increasingly, I think that you've tried to find ways to really have an impact through your work beyond just writing research papers in academic journals, which I know you still do.

First, tell me if I'm right about this path of yours. And then, if I am right, tell me why and how you launched Insurance for Good. Where does that fit on the path for one thing, and is it just part of this evolution? What are you hoping to accomplish with it? I know that's a big question.

Carolyn Kousky: No, that's great. I think you are exactly right. I've always had this desire to engage more deeply with policy in practice. That's why I was so excited to come to RFF right after getting my PhD, because I really felt that that was a community of people who shared that desire. And you're right that my career has been this series of steps getting a little bit further and further away from research each time. I think that's because research has always been, for me, in service of better decisionmaking, of improving environmental and social outcomes for our communities, and of making public policy decisions that are based in evidence. Again, I think that's true for lots of our colleagues. But while I'm trying to do more solutions-building lately, and that can get us to Insurance for Good in a second, I think I still do all that with the view of a researcher and with a scientific worldview—that we need to deeply understand problems and systems and bring the best evidence to bear.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I don't know if you or any of your listeners have read Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense by John Campbell, Robert J. MacCoun, and Saul Perlmutter. It's a recent book. I'm only a few chapters in. This idea that it's more important than ever to have frameworks to evaluate information, to use probabilistic thinking to operate under uncertainty and create shared understanding, and to use concepts that are grounded in science—that’s really important. So, I guess that's to say, I think you're right. I've been making this arc, but I do hope that it's still really informed by the research.

Margaret Walls: That's interesting.

What about Insurance for Good, then?

Carolyn Kousky: As you said at the top, Insurance for Good is a new nonprofit. We're only a few months old, dedicated to helping communities and the public sector use those broad risk-transfer tools we were talking about to meet their social and environmental goals, as you were saying.

I've been working on these topics for a while now. Part of the motivation for starting this organization was seeing a lot of gaps in how we get from that arc of understanding to solutions on the ground. We were seeing that there was no central source for resources on both the problems and the solutions. There'd be a good report over here or an expert over there, but it was really hard for stakeholders, especially those that are new to this, to get ... We were wishing there was more one-stop shopping, as it were, about these types of issues. We were also seeing that the capacity was lacking as insurance markets are starting to break in a lot of places.

It's bringing a lot of new stakeholders into the conversation—communities and groups and others who used to be able to honestly take insurance for granted and not think about it much, and now, all of a sudden, they have to. But insurance is a bit of a different product than people typically engage with. Understanding how it works and how the markets work is really important to getting to solutions. But a lot of these new groups don't have that background. So, we are seeing a lack of opportunities for education and training.

When we start thinking about new solutions, a lot of them require partnerships across sectors, and those are hard when there's not an entity to own them and provide the support and logistics to make them work well. We saw that as another gap. We saw that there was a lot of talk about innovation, but not as much happening on the ground. There were several bottlenecks. Finally, there was this growing community of practice—of people who were thinking about new ways to think about risk transfer in the broader context of managing climate risks, in particular—and there wasn't any way to make that group more than the sum of its parts.

So, those were all the gaps we saw. That's why we started Insurance for Good, to fill those gaps, and we're going to be doing that through four big buckets of activity. One is creating those shared resources, which is our website, our blog, and our newsletter. The second is providing education and capacity building. This is taking a range of different forms. We've had two events already. One was a Q&A around concepts of parametric insurance, which are getting a lot of conversation. We wanted a place where people could come and get their questions answered by experts. We have another one coming up next month that'll be an “insurance 101” for people. The third is open-source innovation, where we work closely with a community or public-sector partner on figuring out what the solution set looks like for a particular problem. And then, the fourth is engaging in policy and regulatory reform, so that we have the right policy and institutional frameworks in place so that insurance can provide the benefits that it's capable of.

Margaret Walls: That's a great explanation.

How did you choose the name? I was just wondering about that. Did you stew on that, or did you have it ready to go?

Carolyn Kousky: No, we stewed a little bit. I've been referring to these ideas offhand as
“insurance for good,” but I think I thought it was a little silly. It might've been our board member, Jonathan Gonzalez, a colleague of mine, who just said, “No, that needs to be the name. Everybody will know right away what you're doing when you say that.” I think I’d had some wonkier names that would've had less traction.

Margaret Walls: I like it. I think he's right about that.

Carolyn, you hinted at this. We're having a lot of problems in insurance markets these days, especially in states like California, Florida, and Louisiana, where disasters are really common. I'm sure our listeners are either reading the same news stories, or they're experiencing these problems personally. Some of them are cancellations of their policies—“non-renewals,” as they're sometimes referred to. Bankruptcies of particular insurance companies, denials of claims, and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about what's been going on? Are there similarities across these states I mentioned? Are the same fundamentals at play, or what are the differences?

Carolyn Kousky: Absolutely. We've been seeing this emerging stress in insurance markets. It's a lot of the things you mentioned—higher prices, concern about insolvencies, declining coverage, shifting of risk into the public sector. Some of that has been pretty national. Some of it's been more localized in particular geographies. We can get into that in a minute.

I do think it's helpful to back up for a second in order to understand the current stress and to make sure listeners are aware that disasters have always been more difficult for the private sector, because everybody gets hit at the same time and the losses can be really bad. And so, as you know, that undermines the basic mathematics of risk pooling when you have these spatially correlated losses that can be really severe. I think the simplest way to think about it is, if you have this heuristic of insurance, everyone's putting some money in a pot. When something bad happens to someone, they get to take that money. You can see how that would work really well for something like car crashes, where every year there's a car crash, but it's not always the same person. But if it's a big hurricane, everybody wants the money at the same time and it's bankrupt. Of course, it's more complicated when you formalize it into our current markets, but I think that gives you the intuition of why it's more challenging.

That has made disaster insurance more expensive, because firms need to access other tools like reinsurance—insurance for themselves. Those cost money. And it's also led to the government stepping in to provide insurance when it's not working so well. As you know, flood insurance is a great example of this, going back 50 or 60 years now.

So, it's not entirely new to see this challenge around providing insurance in the private sector for natural catastrophes. But what's happening now is several things. Some things actually aren't climate change, but we're going to get to climate change in a second, because I think that's the biggest one. For instance, coming out of the pandemic and our prior period of high inflation, it costs a lot more to rebuild, and if it costs more to rebuild, then insurers have to charge more in premiums to make those higher payouts. That led to rising insurance costs across the country. I've paid less attention to that in my own work, because a lot of that is starting to resolve itself. A lot of the challenges we saw in labor markets and supply chains from COVID are worked through now, and inflation has come down.

The one that's difficult for me is climate change, because it's not getting better, as I'm sure all of your listeners are very focused on, because we haven't done the abatement of emissions we need to. We're seeing risks go up year on year on year, and that's making insurability more difficult. So, it's making insuring risk even harder. That's hitting communities in a number of different ways. We're seeing places where events are becoming really frequent—think coastal tidal flooding—and events that happen many times a year. You can't pay to insure those. You'd pay more than the loss if an insurance company's paying out every year. On the other hand, we're also seeing extreme events get even more extreme, this is record-breaking at the other end of the distribution, and that also is making it harder to provide insurance. So, it's become a problem.

Margaret Walls: Am I right that there's similarities across states? In California it's the wildfires, mostly, and in Florida it's coastal flooding. Are there similarities or differences, or what do you have to say about that across states?

Carolyn Kousky: There are definitely a lot of learnings that can transfer across states, because essentially what we're seeing is localized areas where the risk is getting too high for an insurance company to be able to profitably offer it at a price point that people can afford or are willing to pay. You see that in southern Louisiana. You see that in southern Florida, and you see that in the high-wildfire-risk areas of California. That's a very similar dynamic.

What's also similar is that, when that happens and the private sector pulls back, we have state-level insurance programs that come in to give those people insurance. They're often referred to as “markets of last resort.” That's been happening in southern Louisiana and Florida, as we were just talking about. There are areas where the only place you can get an insurance policy now is from the state program.

There's also lots of learnings across those programs. They're all structured a bit differently, but most of them share this common feature, which is that they keep prices lower today by spreading the cost of disasters over future policyholders and policyholders throughout the state. The way they do that varies a little bit. In Florida, when they face a severe-loss year, they go to the bond market and they take on debt to pay the claims, and then they have authority to pay that debt back by assessing almost every line of insurance, with the exception of flood and medical malpractice, throughout the entire state. So, you can just see the cross-subsidies there. In California, their program—the California FAIR Plan, which people, I'm sure, have been reading about after the fires—actually assesses insurance companies directly, and then they can pass some of that on. But it's the same idea of these cross-subsidies, and that raises a lot of questions about who we think should be paying these costs.

Margaret Walls: We could have a whole discussion about this.

Carolyn Kousky: Yes, I know.

Margaret Walls: I want to go on to more about Insurance for Good, but that's really great background. The new organization is focused on the energy transition, disaster recovery, and resilience. It's pretty wide-ranging. It seems pretty ambitious, to me, to tackle all three. Tell us a little bit about why you’re focused on all three and where insurance fits.

Carolyn Kousky: That's great. Our ambitions right now are certainly outpacing our capacity. I'm hoping that we can grow quickly to have our ability to do these things match the level of our ambition. So, that's very fair. But I also think there are strategies that can cross these different types of social and environmental goals, too. And so, there are lessons and synergies across them. But they do vary a bit by issue, so maybe we can take them one at a time. We've seen the most interest so far, unsurprisingly, in resilience and equity. So, maybe we could start there.

With resilience, insurance can help both pre- and post-disaster. There's a lot of interest here, just to back up for a second, because as risks are growing, and it's making it more expensive and difficult to provide insurance, the long-term strategy to stabilize that market stress is to lower the risk. And I think, in everyone's mind who's looking at this, there's this nagging question of, “Shouldn't insurance help with that? Shouldn't insurance also help with the loss reduction?” And it can, potentially, but it needs to do a lot more.

The conversation so far has focused a lot on premium reduction. If you fortify your home or you make these investments in loss reduction, you should get a lower premium, which would be an information signal to you about it, but also a financial incentive. And indeed, several states actually mandate that—lots of Gulf Coast states, including Alabama, Louisiana—tell insurers they have to give you a premium reduction if you have fortified your home against hurricanes. In California, they just issued similar regulations. They didn't tell the insurers how much they have to reduce it, just that they have to reduce it in some way for wildfire mitigation.

I think you and I talked about this years ago. There's some real limitations on that as a driver of loss reduction, in my mind. People need better information on the specific measures that they need to take to lower their risk. Sometimes those might be at a community level and not a household level, and the signals they're getting from their annual insurance policy are not about future risk. And yet, every building and land use decision we make today is going to be around for decades and has to consider future risk. So, there's a lot that still needs to be worked out there.

As a quick aside, a colleague and I have a recent working paper looking at this in California, and we do see that the recent challenges in insurance availability and higher prices are starting to cause people to look at safer homes and to move out of high-risk areas and to look to lower home value. So, we are seeing those impacts start to emerge.

Let me add one more thing, on the topic of resilience, which is a project that we've been working on actively now, which is asking how insurers can do more post-disaster. Disasters are this huge tragedy, and yet, they're also a time when our building stock gets turned over. And so, it seems to me that they need to also be considered a really important opportunity to build differently. In my dream world, that's not just climate resilience, but decarbonizing our building stock at the same time. With over 90 percent of American households having homeowners insurance, insurers have a really natural role there, to both provide better information to people about what measures they need to take, what changes they need to make, as well as potentially giving them extra dollars to do those retrofits at the time of rebuilding. A lot of them, if you do them at the time of rebuilding, are not that much more costly.

If you do a retrofit on an otherwise fine home, that can be expensive. But if you're putting on a new roof anyway, the extra cost to have a fortified roof is a few thousand dollars. Could insurers provide that difference? We've seen that starting to work for limited things, like these fortified roofs. Those types of insurance endorsements are now offered free on all policies in the state insurance programs in Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina. They're showing that they really can pay for themselves in lower future losses and lower future reinsurance costs. I'm hoping that that can be a template to expand it more broadly.

Margaret Walls: That's interesting. Didn't the governor of California just say he was going to lift some requirements so they could build back more quickly in Southern California? Am I imagining that? I thought he said something about how you don't have to have solar panels.

Carolyn Kousky: Yes, I think some things have been lifted. There's also some countervailing forces to get wildfire resilience in there. But this is a challenging dynamic we see after all these disasters. There's this mistaken idea that building back safer means it's going to take a really long time and a ton of money. I think we need to change that mentality and make sure that that's not true—make sure that you can do it on the same timetable and that everyone understands that that's lowering future losses and keeping people safer. We have to do that.

Margaret Walls: That's another topic we need to come back to, because I want to turn to the equity part of this. One of your objectives is to address equity concerns and insurance. This is another thing we've talked about before. I know you've written a lot about so-called “inclusive” insurance. You mentioned parametric insurance. That's often in the equity space, as well.

Tell us about those concerns, what you envision for this part of your work, and that inclusive insurance term. What's meant by that, exactly? Why is that label used?

Carolyn Kousky: That's great. Let me jump in. I think the challenge is multifold, which is why I like that inclusive insurance term. The first and biggest area is that the households that need insurance the most, because they don't have access to other financial resources for recovery, are the same households who can't afford insurance. That's a real challenge. We've been doing work on a range of private-sector innovations and public policy changes that could help address that. The market-innovation side is where you see things like parametric insurance come in, whether there are new types of insurance tools that could help provide that financial protection to more socially vulnerable households.

We could just mention a couple of them. One is microinsurance, which has actually been used throughout developing and emerging economies around the world, but is very new to the US market. The idea is that it pays you a smaller amount, but it pays it very quickly and the dollars are very flexible. The reason it's so fast is that instead of having a loss adjuster come and evaluate all your losses, like in a traditional insurance policy that people in the United States are familiar with, it pays a predefined amount of money based on some observable measure of the hazard. I think the easiest of those triggers, which can get quite complicated to think about, is, for example, wind speeds within so many miles of my house exceed some threshold, and I automatically get $10,000 in the bank or something like that. That's how they're designed to work. Those can be really great to get people recovery dollars that they otherwise couldn't afford, to help them with the really immediate needs of temporary shelter or generators and fuel if the grid's down or whatever it might be.

It's great for renters, because standard policies often don't protect them against one of the biggest things they see after a disaster, which is high rent. But it doesn't replace a full homeowners policy, if that's what you need. In that case, you can't innovate into a super affordable homeowners policy for people. And so, that's where you see the need for either direct policy subsidies or philanthropic support, which we've seen globally. I know you know that with the flood insurance program, for example, there's been this long-standing policy suggestion that we have a means-tested assistance for them. But on the equity side, we're working on both those fronts—the policy change, and also these innovative models that might help.

Margaret Walls: That's great.

Carolyn Kousky: Some of the challenges we're seeing go beyond just affordability. We define inclusive insurance as the range of policies and programs and products that can make not only affordable, but appropriate insurance available to those who are currently not well-served by the market. That gets into other things. For example, we see that insurance policies are actually really different from each other, and one of the challenges we've seen in markets lately, as we were just talking about, is that coverage can start shrinking through hidden limits on what they'll pay for or higher deductibles. People often don't find out about that until the time when they need it.

One policy suggestion from a colleague in Minnesota is to have baseline coverage standards, meaning every insurance policy is going to give you a minimum. Another example that's been talked about is a Community Reinvestment Act for insurance. That was an act created in the late ‘70s for the financial sector for banks to help increase services provided in low-income communities. Could we think about something like that to encourage more insurance products in low-income communities? Things like that.

Margaret Walls: That's good. I'm glad to hear you talk about that, too, because I agree. It's not all about the premiums.

Carolyn, one more question for you. You talked about some of the activities of Insurance for Good. It's a hub of resources. I encourage people to go to the website, because there's a lot there. I want to ask you, particularly, how you're engaging with the industry on this, and who else you are engaged with.

Carolyn Kousky: That's a great question. We're doing that for those four activities, including shared resources, education, and capacity building. On education and capacity building, we're partnering with many different groups—and we'd love to partner with more—on who needs different types of information, assistance, or education around insurance. The third bucket we're doing is innovation. We were talking about microinsurance; how you get an appropriate microinsurance product up and going in a community that actually meets their needs. It's something we've been in conversations about in Philadelphia, where I'm based, for example.

We tend to partner first with a community or public-sector entity to really define the problem clearly that we're solving for and then think about the range of solutions that might work. Sometimes those are policy or regulatory changes, but they might be the need for a privately offered product that's not available yet. That's when we start partnering with the private sector on developing those products and getting them to market and figuring out what the barriers are and how we can overcome them. So, it requires a whole bunch of partnerships to get the work done. We do have two advisory boards, and the private sector is one of those, to help make sure that the things we're coming up with actually work for the industry.

Margaret Walls: That's great. Gosh, you must be so busy. It makes me tired thinking about it.

We're about out of time. Carolyn, it's been a great pleasure having you on Resources Radio, talking about insurance and all these complex challenges, but also opportunities that insurance or risk transfer provides.

We always have to do Top of the Stack, and you probably came prepared for that. So, quickly, do you have something on the top of your stack—a book, article, movie, podcast, anything you want to recommend?

Carolyn Kousky: I've actually just been reading this book I'm really enjoying. It's called Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola. He analyzes networks, and it really upends a lot of preconceived ideas that I had about how innovation and social movements spread. So, if anyone's interested in how things catch on and how culture and perceptions change and how social movements begin, I'd recommend it.

Margaret Walls: Oh, that sounds super interesting. That's something I would like for sure.

Carolyn Kousky: It does. I think you would.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, thanks for that. Well, anyway, back to my thank you, Carolyn. I really loved having you on, and it's been great to hear about Insurance for Good. I'm going to encourage all of our listeners to go to your website and check it out and stay in touch with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Carolyn Kousky: Thanks so much for having me. I always enjoy chatting with you.

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