Climate Change Makes It Hard to Insure Homes in US

The insurance crisis spreading across the US arrived at Mr. Richard D. Zimmel's door in December in the form of a letter.

- Christopher Flavelle and Mira Rojanasakul

Mr. Zimmel, who lives in the increasingly fire-prone hills outside Silver City, New Mexico, had done everything right.

He trimmed the trees away from his house and covered his yard in gravel to stop flames rushing in from the forest near his property.

In case that buffer zone failed, he sheathed his house in fire-resistant stucco and topped it with a non-combustible steel roof.

None of it mattered. His insurance company, Homesite Insurance, dumped him. "Property is located in a brushfire or wildfire area that no longer meets Homesite's minimum standard for wildfire risk," the letter read.

Mr. Zimmel has company. Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts across the US have been dropped -- "non-renewed," in industry parlance. In more than 200 counties, the non-renewal rate has tripled or more.

As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, the US' once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.

The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you cannot get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans cannot buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, the police and other basic services.

As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

Now, for the first time, the scale of that pull-back is becoming public. Last autumn, the Senate Budget Committee demanded that the country's largest insurance companies provide the number of non-renewals by county and year.

The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.