Physical Climate Risk and Insurers
As the frequency and severity of natural disasters increase with climate change, insurance—the main tool for households and businesses to hedge natural disaster risks—becomes increasingly important. Can the insurance sector withstand the stress of climate change? To answer this question, it is necessary to first understand insurers’ exposure to physical climate risk, that is, risks coming from physical manifestations of climate change, such as natural disasters. In this post, based on our recent staff report, we construct a novel factor to measure the aggregate physical climate risk in the financial market and discuss its applications, including the assessment of insurers’ exposure to climate risk and the expected capital shortfall of insurers under climate stress scenarios.
Blog Series on the Economic and Financial Impacts of Extreme Weather Events in the Fed’s Second District
The frequency and ferocity of extreme weather events, such as flooding, storms, and deadly heat waves, have been on the rise in recent years. These climate events, along with human adaption to cope with them, may have large effects on the economy and financial markets. It is therefore paramount to provide research about the economy’s vulnerability to climate events for policymakers, households, financial institutions, and other players in the world economy to make informed decisions. In the coming days, we are going to present a series of nine posts that attempt to take a step in this direction while focusing on the Federal Reserve System’s Second District (NY, northern NJ, southwest CT, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). The twelve Federal Reserve Districts are depicted in this map.