After Years of Pressure, Treasury Department Releases Data and Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Insurance

January 16, 2025

After Years of Pressure, Treasury Department Releases Data and Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Insurance

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Treasury's Federal Insurance Office (FIO) today released a trove of data and a reportdetailing the impact of climate change on insurance consumers. The release comes after Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform warned that climate change could create an affordability crisisand brought together 80 organizations and over ten thousand people to push FIOto collect and release the data. In response, Carly Fabian, senior insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen's Climate Program,issued the following statement:

"This report shows exactly what we feared: climate change is creating an insurance crisis for households across the country. For many Americans, home ownership is a key part of the American Dream, and climate change is now pushing that dream out of reach. While insurance companies will no doubt find ways to profit from the crisis, households across the country cannot sustain rising costs indefinitely."

"While this report is an essential step, it is only a first window into the data necessary to monitor this crisis. The fact that the Federal Insurance Office had to be the first to propose collecting and now publishing this data shows the utter failure of the fragmented state regulatory system to protect the public. In the aftermath of the fires in Los Angeles and the devastation in Asheville, policymakers across the country should see this data as a blaring warning that they can no longer ignore the alarm bells of a climate-driven financial crisis."

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