Agencies, insurers look at coastal areas

Robb Fulcher in Easy Reader News: Insurers have been trying to anticipate the danger of flooding, wildfire and drought in coastal areas, which could accompany climate change from greenhouse gas emissions and other factors, a researcher told a symposium co-sponsored by the City of Hermosa Beach.

A number of scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, told how government agencies, researchers and private-sector organizations are attempting to plan for deeply uncertain scenarios presaged by climate-change research, at the Monday symposium held at the sprawling Northrop Grumman plant in Redondo Beach.

…Sean B. Hecht, executive director of the UCLA Environmental Law Center, said Lloyd’s of London and other large “re-insurers” — which insure the insurance companies against losses — are mulling possible coastal effects of climate change including wildfires, and flooding and storms from rising sea levels. Insurers drive much of our behavior, Hecht said, because investments cannot be made, businesses cannot be launched and developments cannot be built unless they can be insured.

But, he said, insurers cannot be counted on to discourage risky behavior. Government regulators aim to keep insurance affordable, which can encourage possibly risky actions such as dense development in attractive coastal areas and “serial rebuilding” in areas that see regular flooding, Hecht said.

Entities willing to plan for possible effects of climate change include water agencies such as the Metropolitan Water District, which are required to prepare long-term plans for water availability, Robert J. Lempert, a scholar in the field of “decision making under conditions of deep uncertainty,” told the symposium.

…“Deep uncertainty” exists in climate change scenarios, Lempert said. He encourages long-range planners to “run their plans backwards,” identifying where they are vulnerable, determining what fixes could be made, and then studying the costs of the fixes….

A statue of a surfer in Hermosa Beach, shot by Christophe.Finot, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license