Blue Marble

Despite record heat and extreme weather disasters in recent years, insurers aren't adequately planning for climate change, according to a report issued Thursday. Only 13 percent of insurance companies have a "specific, comprehensive strategy" to deal with global warming.

Researchers at Ceres, a nonprofit that advocates for businesses to become more sustainable, looked at 184 responses from major insurance companies to a new National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) survey on climate risk. They found that only 23 of those companies—which include property and casualty, life, and health insurers—are really taking climate change seriously. Thirteen of those are foreign-owned companies.

Out of a potential score of 50 points for climate readiness, insurers averaged a 7.3 overall. Property and casualty insurers—the ones that have to pay out when a monster storm wrecks your house, for example—were more on the ball, with eight actually describing concrete ways they are taking climate change into account in their business. But major insurers like Allstate and Travelers expressed "strong ambivalence about the state of the science" in their disclosures, Ceres found.

Ten percent of responders—many of them life and health insurers—argued that the survey was "not relevant" for their business. The report flags one response from health insurer Excellus that argues that "the Company is not aware of any conclusive data that there are health effects directly (or indirectly) related to climate change." But, as we've reported here before, climate impacts like heat waves, the spread of vector-borne diseases, among others, pose what some in the medical community have dubbed the "biggest global health threat of the 21st century." Only one health insurer, Kaiser Permanente, had a strong position on climate change.

The report's authors found that 88 of the 184 companies said they see climate change as a "potential future loss driver," rather than a current threat. They note, however, that these responses were collected in May 2012—well before Hurricane Sandy which, along with other extreme weather events, caused $58 billion in losses for the insurance industry last year.

This could be bad business for insurance companies, but it's also bad for the rest of us that rely on insurance, Ceres argues. "The insurance sector is a key driver of our overall economy," said Mindy Luber, president of Ceres. "Every segment of insurance industry faces climate risks, and yet the industry's response has been uneven." Luber argued that even just accounting for the risks would go a long way toward helping them address them. "What gets measured gets managed."

Insurance regulators care too, because allowing the risks to go unmanaged could be expensive for policy holders. "Climate has the potential of being a game changer for the insurance industry and we want to make sure it stays on their radar," said Mike Kreidler, the insurance commissioner for Washington State, which is one of three states mandating climate disclosures. "A lot of companies aren't doing much yet."

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Syrian rebels rally in Aleppo last November. Pau Rigol/ZUMA

In October 2010, just months before a Tunisian street vendor self-immolated and sparked what would become the Arab Spring, a prolonged drought was turning Syria's verdant farmland into dust. By last month, more than 70,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, had been killed in the brutal and ongoing conflict between President Bashar al-Assad's dictatorial regime and a coalition of opposition forces; just today, the UN announced that over one million refugees fled the country in the last two years. International security experts are now looking at the connection between recent droughts in the Middle East and the protests, revolutions, and deaths that followed, and building a body of evidence to suggest that climate change played a key role in Syria's violence and the Arab Spring generally.

The possibility that climate change could affect security is nothing new: The US Department of Defense has proven to be surprisingly progressive on planning for global warming. But Caitlin Werrell and Francesco Femia, co-founders of the Washington-based Center for Climate and Security, argue that if you want to see the connection between climate and conflict in action today, look no further than Syria. The pair contributed to a series of essays released last week by the Center for American Progress, all arguing that the Arab Spring is a textbook example of the link between climate change and social instability. Climate Desk called them up to discuss how lack of rainfall leads into violent uprising, and how the international community can prepare for the future of extreme weather.

Climate Desk: How does climate change play into civil unrest? Where does it rank compared to other violence-causing factors?

Caitlin Werrell: We use the term "threat multiplier" or "accelerant of instability," in the sense that climate change can exacerbate other threats to national or international security. The way it does that is often through water: You have an increased prevalence of drought or floods or changing rainfall patterns, and what this does is it changes your ability to grow food, it has impacts on food security, it influences your ability to produce energy, it influences your infrastructure.

Francesco Femia: We wouldn't actually rank climate change amongst other factors; we would say that climate change is one of those almost special factors that exacerbates other drivers of unrest and/or conflict. It just makes other drivers of unrest worse.

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This computer can sniff out and pinpoint methane emissions from fracking.

Although natural gas production emits less CO2 than other fossil fuels, it still spits plenty of junk into the atmosphere. But backers of a new gadget released yesterday say they've hit on a way to help frackers clean up their act.

Boosters of natural gas often flaunt the stuff as a "clean" fossil fuel, because when it burns—in a power plant, say—it releases far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil. But with the growth of fracking nationwide, some academics and environmentalists have flagged a silent problem that threatens to undermine the purported climate gains of natural gas: "fugitive" methane emissions.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, even more so than CO2 over the short-term. And natural gas production creates a lot of it: The EPA predicts that methane from the natural gas industry will be one of the top sources of non-CO2 emissions in coming decades. A 2011 federal study found that taken all around, the total greenhouse footprint for shale gas could be up to twice that of coal over a 20-year period. The catch is that it doesn't have to be so bad. Much of that methane is leaking out (hence "fugitive") unnecessarily from gas wells, pipelines, and storage facilities—so much so that the Environmental Defense Fund calls methane leakage from natural gas operations "the single largest US source of short-term climate-forcing gases".

But nailing down exactly how much methane leakage there is has proved a bit challenging: Some independent academic studies say up to nine percent of all the natural gas extracted leaks out, while the official EPA figure is less than three percent. Academics, government agencies, and environmental NGOs are at work to shore up this figure, but the effort can be costly and require teams of specialized physicists and chemists. 

Enter Picarro, a California-based scientific instrument company that yesterday released a new gadget the company says will streamline locating leaks and finding out how much methane is streaming out of them. The "Surveyor" attaches to any car, and consists of a computer, an air sampling hose, and a GPS device. Together, says Picarro CEO Michael Woelk, they can sniff out methane and pinpoint the exact spot—like a crack in a pipe—it's coming from, then feed the data to any web-enabled mobile device in a format understandable without an atmospheric physics PhD. 

"All we have to do is drive downwind of the source," Woelk said.

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A wild Andrena bee visits a highbush blueberry flower. Rufus Isaacs

The foods that make our meals more colorful and delicious—coffee, watermelon, almonds, to name a few—depend on pollinators like bees. In fact, three-quarters of global food crops rely at least partly on pollination by animals. But two reports published in Science last week show how wild pollinating insects such as bumblebees, butterflies, and beetles are disappearing, putting these foods at risk. Plus, one of the reports reveals, substituting hives of honeybees isn't going to cut it—according to research collected across 20 countries, managed honeybees don't do nearly as good of a job at pollinating as their wild counterparts.

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