Understanding Disaster Insurance

Understanding Disaster Insurance
Author: Carolyn Kousky
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 164283226X

The frequency and intensity of natural disasters—such as wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and storms—is on the rise, threatening our way of life and our livelihoods. Managing this growing risk will be central to economic and social progress in the coming decades. Insurance, an often confusing and unpopular tool, will be critical to successfully emerging from the effects of these crises. Its traditional role is to protect us from unforeseen and unanticipated risk, but as currently structured, insurance cannot adequately respond to these types of threats. How can we improve insurance to provide consistent and sufficient help following all disasters? How do we use insurance not just to help us recover, but also to help us prevent disasters in the first place? And how can insurance help us achieve broader social and environmental goals? Understanding Disaster Insurance provides an accessible introduction to the complexities—and exciting possibilities—of risk transfer markets in the U.S. and around the world. Carolyn Kousky, a leading researcher on disaster risk and insurance, explains how traditional insurance markets came to be structured and why they fall short in meeting the needs of a world coping with climate change. She then offers realistic, yet hopeful, examples of new approaches. With examples ranging from individual entrepreneurs to multi-country collaborations, she shows how innovative thinking and creative applications of insurance-based mechanisms can improve recovery outcomes for people and their communities. She also explores the role of insurance in supporting policy goals beyond disaster recovery, such as nature-positive approaches for larger environmental impact. The book holds up the possibility that new risk transfer markets, brought to scale, could help create more equitable and sustainable economies. Insurance and risk transfer markets can be a powerful tool for adapting to climate change, yet they are frequently misunderstood. Many find insurance confusing or even problematic and ineffective. Understanding Disaster Insurance is a useful guidebook for policymakers, innovators, students, and other decision makers working to secure a resilient future—and anyone affected by wind, fire, rain, or flood.

A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation

A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation
Author: Carolyn Kousky
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642831395

Tens of millions of Americans are at risk from sea level rise, increased tidal flooding, and intensifying storms. A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation identifies a bold new research and policy agenda and provides implementable options for coastal communities responding to these threats. In this book, coastal adaptation experts present a range of climate adaptation policies that could protect coastal communities against increasing risk, including concrete financing recommendations. Coastal adaptation will not be easy, but it is achievable using varied approaches. A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation will inspire innovative and cross-disciplinary thinking about coastal policy at the state and local level while providing actionable, realistic policy and planning options for adaptation professionals and policymakers.

Understanding Disaster Insurance

Understanding Disaster Insurance
Author: Carolyn Kousky
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642832251

The frequency and intensity of natural disasters is on the rise. Insurance, an often confusing and unpopular tool, will be critical to successfully emerging from the effects of these crises. Understanding Disaster Insurance provides an accessible introduction to the complexities--and exciting possibilities--of risk transfer markets in the U.S. and around the world. Carolyn Kousky, a leading researcher on disaster risk and insurance, explains how traditional insurance markets came to be structured and why they fall short in meeting the needs of a world coping with climate change. She then offers realistic, yet hopeful, examples of new approaches. Understanding Disaster Insurance is a useful guidebook for policymakers, innovators, students, and other decision makers working to secure a resilient future--and anyone affected by wind, fire, rain, or flood.

The Cure for Catastrophe

The Cure for Catastrophe
Author: Robert Muir-Wood
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0465096476

We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.

Underwater

Underwater
Author: Rebecca Elliott
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231548818

Communities around the United States face the threat of being underwater. This is not only a matter of rising waters reaching the doorstep. It is also the threat of being financially underwater, owning assets worth less than the money borrowed to obtain them. Many areas around the country may become economically uninhabitable before they become physically unlivable. In Underwater, Rebecca Elliott explores how families, communities, and governments confront problems of loss as the climate changes. She offers the first in-depth account of the politics and social effects of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which provides flood insurance protection for virtually all homes and small businesses that require it. In doing so, the NFIP turns the risk of flooding into an immediate economic reality, shaping who lives on the waterfront, on what terms, and at what cost. Drawing on archival, interview, ethnographic, and other documentary data, Elliott follows controversies over the NFIP from its establishment in the 1960s to the present, from local backlash over flood maps to Congressional debates over insurance reform. Though flood insurance is often portrayed as a rational solution for managing risk, it has ignited recurring fights over what is fair and valuable, what needs protecting and what should be let go, who deserves assistance and on what terms, and whose expectations of future losses are used to govern the present. An incisive and comprehensive consideration of the fundamental dilemmas of moral economy underlying insurance, Underwater sheds new light on how Americans cope with loss as the water rises.

Pay Up!

Pay Up!
Author: Chip Merlin
Publisher: Forbesbooks
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781946633828

"Attorney Chip Merlin exposes the bad faith practices of insurance companies that take advantage of their own customers" -- Page 2 of jacket.

Natural Catastrophe Risk Management and Modelling

Natural Catastrophe Risk Management and Modelling
Author: Kirsten Mitchell-Wallace
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1118906071

This book covers both the practical and theoretical aspects of catastrophe modelling for insurance industry practitioners and public policymakers. Written by authors with both academic and industry experience it also functions as an excellent graduate-level text and overview of the field. Ours is a time of unprecedented levels of risk from both natural and anthropogenic sources. Fortunately, it is also an era of relatively inexpensive technologies for use in assessing those risks. The demand from both commercial and public interests—including (re)insurers, NGOs, global disaster management agencies, and local authorities—for sophisticated catastrophe risk assessment tools has never been greater, and contemporary catastrophe modelling satisfies that demand. Combining the latest research with detailed coverage of state-of-the-art catastrophe modelling techniques and technologies, this book delivers the knowledge needed to use, interpret, and build catastrophe models, and provides greater insight into catastrophe modelling’s enormous potential and possible limitations. The first book containing the detailed, practical knowledge needed to support practitioners as effective catastrophe risk modellers and managers Includes hazard, vulnerability and financial material to provide the only independent, comprehensive overview of the subject, accessible to students and practitioners alike Demonstrates the relevance of catastrophe models within a practical, decision-making framework and illustrates their many applications Includes contributions from many of the top names in the field, globally, from industry, academia, and government Natural Catastrophe Risk Management and Modelling: A Practitioner’s Guide is an important working resource for catastrophe modelling analysts and developers, actuaries, underwriters, and those working in compliance or regulatory functions related to catastrophe risk. It is also valuable for scientists and engineers seeking to gain greater insight into catastrophe risk management and its applications.

Unbreakable

Unbreakable
Author: Stephane Hallegatte
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2016-11-24
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1464810044

'Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015.' Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight of poor people. This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to well-being than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities. Poor people suffer only a fraction of economic losses caused by disasters, but they bear the brunt of their consequences. Understanding the disproportionate vulnerability of poor people also makes the case for setting new intervention priorities to lessen the impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor, such as expanding financial inclusion, disaster risk and health insurance, social protection and adaptive safety nets, contingent finance and reserve funds, and universal access to early warning systems. Efforts to reduce disaster risk and poverty go hand in hand. Because disasters impoverish so many, disaster risk management is inseparable from poverty reduction policy, and vice versa. As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.

Disaster Insurance Reimagined

Disaster Insurance Reimagined
Author: Paula Jarzabkowski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2023-08
Genre:
ISBN: 0192865161

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book examines the growing role and importance of 'Protection Gap Entities' (PGEs), not-for-profit entities providing insurance protection that would otherwise be unavailable within a purely private sector context. Around the world, PGEs and the insurance instruments they use are becoming increasingly crucial in making sure that funds are available to rebuild after disasters. These PGEs, typically developed as collaborations between governments and the insurance industry, enable insurance to continue at a time when climate change, urbanization, global interdependence, and geo-political instability are making disaster insurance increasingly expensive or unavailable. Given their growing importance, understanding the role of PGEs in both insurance protection and their potential to create a more resilient society is critical. Disaster Insurance Reimagined uses practical examples from different countries to explain how PGEs step in to maintain disaster insurance and how their work can, but does not always, improve financial and physical resilience to disaster. Drawing on 5 years of research into 17 entities that provide insurance cover in 49 countries, the authors examine the strengths, limitations, and evolution of PGEs in providing disaster protection in the face of a growing insurance crisis. They provide an accessible discussion of disaster insurance, its complexities, and the transformation it needs to undergo in order to remain relevant and to contribute to meaningful disaster protection. PGEs and their work offer a path to re-imagining disaster insurance as a key tool in an ecosystem that has societal protection from disaster at its heart.

Introduction to Emergency Management

Introduction to Emergency Management
Author: George Haddow
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2013-09-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0124104053

Introduction to Emergency Management, Fifth Edition, offers a fully up-to-date analysis of US emergency management principles. In addition to expanding coverage of risk management in a time of climate change and terrorism, Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola discuss the impact of new emergency management technologies, social media, and an increasing focus on recovery. They examine the effects of the 2012 election results and discuss FEMA’s controversial National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Introduction to Emergency Management, Fifth Edition, gives instructors and students the best textbook content, instructor-support materials, and online resources to prepare future EM professionals for this demanding career. Introduction to FEMA's Whole Community disaster preparedness initiative Material on recent disaster events, including the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013), Hurricane Sandy (2012), the Joplin Tornado (2011), the Haiti Earthquake (2011), and the Great East Japan Earthquake (2010) New and updated material on the Department of Homeland Security and the ongoing efforts of the emergency management community to manage terrorism hazards Top-of-the-line ancillaries that can be uploaded to Blackboard and other course management systems.