There is a new blog post out at the Southern Plains Perspective! Read below:
The Southern Plains Perspective is authored by Clay Pope, who farms with his wife Sarah and is a contractor for the USDA Southern Plains Climate Hub in the area of outreach.
Just sittin’ around repeating myself—we need to take extreme weather adaptation seriously because climate change is real and it’s having economic impacts!!!
“Insurers pull back as US climate catastrophes intensify.” That was the headline of a story I just saw this morning. It went on to talk about how the insurance industry is currently scaling back their presence in more vulnerable states due to the financial risks caused by the more extreme weather events that climate change is exacerbating.
Here are a few examples–
Major Insurance companies have announced they will no longer write new property insurance policies in Florida, citing “catastrophe costs … at historically high levels.” Others have stopped issuing policies along the Sunshine State’s hurricane-vulnerable coastline.
California’s largest homeowners’ insurer announced in May that it was establishing a moratorium on new policies there due to “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure,” especially from devastating wildfires.
And if you think this is just in states like California and Florida, you should know that all over the country, there are insurers who are less willing to take risks from everything ranging from floods along major rivers to areas vulnerable to tornadoes.
Hear that Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas? Tornadoes.
Luckily, Federal Crop Insurance works a little different than property and homeowner’s insurance. That said, we need to recognize that the risks generated by extreme weather events are real and that they have real world costs. One witness at a recent U.S. Senate hearing even said “Just as the U.S. economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is overexposed to climate risk.”
That wasn’t a quote from a university scientist or an environmental activist. It was from the president of an insurance company consulting firm.
We know extreme weather impacts agriculture production. You only need to read a recent report from Texas Agri-life Extension about the effect the recent record heat has had on everything from cotton to cattle to understand how the wild weather is impacting farmers and ranchers. Throw in what looks more and more likely to be a powerful El Nino on the horizon (and with it potentially record global temperatures) and it becomes clear that we need to take the chance for more extreme weather seriously. We need to get ahead of this instead of reacting to the fall-out of a weather related disaster.
As I have mentioned many times recently, USDA has resources available to help farmers and ranchers prepare better for the droughts, floods, and other impacts of climate change through new funding in programs like the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). USDA is also making major investments in electric grid resiliency and clean energy (I wrote about some of this in an earlier blog post) and working on new research on crops and livestock to help develop strategies to better prepare for extreme weather.
I know it seems that I keep harping on the need to better prepare for the effects of climate change. From all indications it seems that the challenges are just going to keep coming. We need to get ready for them.
