Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and the department are under pressure to tackle the insurance availability and affordability issues that have plagued the state because some insurers have stopped renewing or writing new homeowner policies here, citing wildfire risk as a big factor.
The report also follows years of warnings about extreme heat and other effects of climate change by other state entities, such as the Legislative Analyst’s Office, and lawmakers’ efforts to address them.
The 92-page report, which assesses the insured and uninsured costs of heat and recommends quick action and changes, was mandated by a bill Lara sponsored that was signed into law in 2022, whose main goal was to establish an extreme heat ranking system. That system, CalHeatScore, is being developed now by the state Environmental Protection Agency with help from other state agencies and is set to roll out next year.
The effects of extreme heat are disproportionately borne by low-income communities, older adults and outdoor workers, the report also found. Black, Native American and Hispanic Californians had the highest rates of deaths, respectively, compared with Asian and white California residents, during the events examined by the report. That’s why the report’s authors — the Insurance Department, with input from the state’s Climate Insurance Working Group and a consultant it hired to produce the report — call for equity when thinking about extreme heat policies and programs by considering the needs of vulnerable populations, including elderly people living alone, and outdoor and indoor workers.
Besides the hundreds of deaths, the report showed that extreme heat resulted in more than 5,000 hospitalizations, almost 10,600 emergency department visits, more than 138,000 outpatient visits and nearly 344 adverse birth outcomes.
Kathy Baughman McLeod is chief executive of Climate Resilience for All, a global non-governmental organization dedicated to addressing extreme heat for vulnerable communities. She is part of the working group and said the data from this new report could help with the “normalization of insurance products related to heat.”
“We could use this data to create forecast-based insurance products that pay out when the forecast for the heat wave comes,” she said.
Baughman McLeod would know — she has worked with insurers on creating new insurance products, such as insurance that helps replace women’s income in India when they’re unable to work on extremely hot days because the products they sell might spoil or their work hours are reduced. She also helped create insurance for coral reefs in Mexico.
Meanwhile, the effects of extreme heat on health and life insurance are not known yet. Adrita Bhattacharya-Craven, director of health and demography at global insurance think tank The Geneva Association, said the Insurance Department’s findings align with some of her organization’s findings on health, climate and insurance, especially the disproportionate effects on the elderly and vulnerable populations. She said there is hardly any climate-sensitive data on mortality or morbidity when processing insurance claims, except for deaths from wildfires or possibly extreme heat.
“For example, a medical professional is likely to report a stroke as just a stroke without specifying that it was induced by prolonged heat exposure,” Bhattacharya-Craven said. “There are no tools to consistently capture such information right now… In the long run, we need to map vulnerability with more granularity.”
Other main recommendations in the report:
- Expand investment in planning for disasters, as well as use existing state and federal funding to prioritize efforts such as strengthening infrastructure against extreme weather, and restoring access to trees and green spaces.
- Encourage strategies to try to reduce heat-related illnesses and injuries for workers across sectors. That includes incentivizing businesses to “meet benchmarks above the minimum indoor and outdoor temperature standards” set by governments.
- Improve tracking costs of planning for extreme heat events.
The report also recommends planting more trees, which could help provide shade, improve health outcomes, reduce energy needs and more. It also calls for cooling systems for dairy cows, which is important because California is the largest dairy producer in the nation.
A few of the recommendations are already happening in some fashion. The state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board recently approved a rule requiring employers to reduce the risk of extreme heat for warehouse, restaurant and other workers. After a long delay, it’s set to take effect in August. Also last week, the federal OSHA proposed a rule, years in the making, that tells employers how they should protect indoor and outdoor workers from heat when temperatures reach two thresholds: 80 degrees and 90 degrees.
