Whole Earth Disaster Movie: The Kleptogarchy part 13

Posted: August 23, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Climate, Ecology, Insurance | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Whole Earth Disaster Movie

The Day After Tomorrow was a typical disaster film, premised on a sudden deep freeze forcing survivors to flee south from the USA to an apparently unaffected Mexico, where American refugees were made welcome. It did not seem to cross their minds that Mexicans might send them right back! This 2004 film was about indomitable humans surviving against the odds, the message being that even nature’s worst calamities are survivable, at least for some resourceful humans. The Day After Tomorrow presented a disaster on a national scale, unlike many predecessors like The Towering Inferno (a skyscraper on fire) or The Poseidon Adventure (capsized, doomed liner). Humans rather like watching mock disasters, especially if some characters are allowed a happy ending. Real disasters without happy endings are less palatable. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started on February 24th 2022, was immediately a lethal, resource-destroying, emission-spewing hell. Three days later, on February 27th, the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from Working Group II, warned about the potentially catastrophic impacts of failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability highlights multiple interacting risks.

“Complex risks result from multiple climate hazards occurring concurrently, and from multiple risks interacting, compounding overall risk and resulting in risks transmitting through interconnected systems and across regions.”[1]

The authors amplify the warning:

“Widespread deterioration of ecosystem structure and function, resilience and natural adaptive capacity, as well as shifts in seasonal timing have occurred due to climate change (high confidence), with adverse socioeconomic consequences (high confidence). Approximately half of the species assessed globally have shifted polewards or, on land, also to higher elevations (very high confidence). Hundreds of local losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes (high confidence) as well as mass mortality events on land and in the ocean (very high confidence) and loss of kelp forests (high confidence).”[2]

It gets worse. According to the report, about 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in areas that are highly vulnerable to climate change, the physical and mental health of people around the world has been adversely affected, and humanitarian crises grow where climate hazards interact with high vulnerability in communities.

Not just climate hazards. When people are competing for depleted resources, peace is rarely the outcome. One of the reasons for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, apart from a hubristic attempt at empire rebuilding, appeared to be strangulation of the Ukrainian economy, by occupying the major Black Sea ports including Odesa, Kherson and Mariupol, and so preventing exports, and the same time bombing factories and farmland to reduce the products that can be exported. All-out warfare counteracts efforts at emissions reductions for multiple reasons: consumption of fossil fuels by troops and fleeing civilians, carbon-intensive manufacture of weapons, destruction of buildings and infrastructure that must probably be replaced at some stage. Competition leading to conflict accelerates climate change, a multiplication of tragedies. Yet world leaders tend to treat climate change as separate from other policies, when the risk of an uninhabitable world should be a critical factor in all policies.

Lack of resilience may be more immediately obvious among ‘vulnerable communities’ but the relatively affluent world is affected more and more. The insurance and reinsurance industries are a case in point. How many disasters can insurance companies withstand?

“Because only a small number of policyholders are likely to suffer an insured harm in a given period, the money from the lucky policyholders covers the claims of the unlucky. However, this system breaks down when large portions of the population suffer harms at the same time, as is the case with many climate-related events,” wrote Bridget Pals and Michael Panfil about the USA in 2021. “Consider a wildfire, which can affect an entire region. In response, insurers may either raise premiums beyond what most Americans can afford or pull out of a high-risk market altogether, leaving gaps in coverage and reducing accessibility (an alarmingly common trend for homeowners in wildfire-prone areas of California).”[3]

This article was written for an American audience, but commercial insurance faces the same squeeze all over the world: more disasters, bigger payouts, higher premiums that become unaffordable. A vicious spiral.

People without enough food are not going to prioritise insurance premiums. The Sixth IPCC report points out that:

“Climate change will increasingly put pressure on food production and access, especially in vulnerable regions, undermining food security and nutrition (high confidence). Increases in frequency, intensity and severity of droughts, floods and heatwaves, and continued sea level rise will increase risks to food security (high confidence) in vulnerable regions from moderate to high between 1.5 deg C and 2 deg C global warming level, with no or low levels of adaptation (medium confidence).”[4]

Soils will suffer, pollination will suffer, pests and diseases will become more prevalent. The negative impacts will be multiplied when separate crises interact.

“Multiple climate hazards will occur simultaneously, and multiple climatic and non-climatic risks will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions. Some responses to climate change result in new impacts and risks (high confidence).”[5]

The IPCC has scant confidence in adaptation measures so far, commenting that there is “increased evidence of maladaptation across many sectors and regions” since the previous report. We are running out of time:

“Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”

It was against this background of the last-chance saloon that Russia invaded Ukraine, a series of destructive actions that took a wrecking ball to human lives in the path of the advancing troops, and counteracted efforts to keep fossil fuels in the ground and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, thereby threatening billions of lives in the future.

[1] ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, February 2022, Summary for Policymakers, SPM 7 (B).

[2] Ibid, SPM 8 (B.1.1)

[3] ‘Climate Change Comes to Insurance’ by Bridget Pals and Michael Panfil, in The Hill, December 30th 2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/584240-climate-change-comes-to-insurance, accessed March 8th 2022.

[4] IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, February 2022, Summary for Policymakers, SPM 14 (B.4.3).

[5] Ibid, SPM 18 (B.5).

Uninsurable Thatch Cuts Architectural Diversity

Posted: July 6, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Insurance | Tags: , | Leave a comment

By Pat Dodd Racher

Insurance cover is drying up. Owners of properties which have waters lapping through them from time to time know about insurance difficulties already, but the continuing agreement between the UK government and insurance companies means most[i] owners of flood-risk properties  should be able to obtain some cover, albeit expensively.

Thatch is a different matter. We tried recently to buy a small thatched cottage, but had to walk away just as the purchase contract was about to be exchanged, because we could not find any insurer willing to sell us a policy.

Thatch as a vernacular roofing is age-old, part of the historic fabric of these islands, but its future seems to lie in museums or in the hands of the very rich who can afford to take financial risks without worrying about the consequences.

The cottage is on the market again, so I will not identify it, but my advice to a potential purchaser is to find a willing insurer as the first step, not the final one, before signing on the dotted line.

Homes that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged, either, and their value plunges. And even if there is an insurer somewhere who will sell cover today, what happens in future? The many dangerous effects of climate change include more and worse floods, and more fires, which for homeowners mean insurance climbing towards the unaffordable, or no insurance at all.

The cottage denied insurance is 18th-century, quirky and quaint. Our first call was to NFU Mutual, the vendor’s current insurers (and ours too). We are long-established customers, but the word ‘thatch’ was enough for the shutters to come down, unless we were willing to live in it all through the intended renovations. The thought of winter without a bathroom or wc, or any heating, was too much for my ageing bones. If we had been 30 years younger, this might, just might, have been a way out of the impasse.

Crown Insurance Services of Egham, Surrey, said they do insure thatched homes, through Heritage Insurance Agency of Sudbury, Suffolk. Hopes raised, only to be dashed by the requirement that there must be a fire station within five miles. Opening a fire station is way beyond our capabilities.

Adrian Flux Insurance Services of King’s Lynn also sells cover for thatched houses. This is from their website:

“Adrian Flux Home is one of the leading specialist home insurance brokers in the UK and one of only a few offering a full range of insurance cover to owners of Thatched properties.

If you live in a property with a thatched roof, you will probably have experienced problems getting insurance cover at a reasonable price. That’s where Adrian Flux can help. Our Home & Contents cover will make sure that your thatched home insurance is adequate in the event of a mishap, and at a price you’ll like.”

Well, the cottage did not qualify. The first hurdle, as with the NFU, was the combination of thatch with being empty during renovations.

The Thatched Owners Group, at Spalding in Lincolnshire, had a picture on their website of a cottage very like the one we were hoping to buy. Here we met barriers that we had never been far enough down the insurance road to encounter before. I was unable to answer a barrage of admittedly relevant questions. What is the exact thatching material? How deep is the thatch? When was the last time it received a fire-retarding treatment? When were the chimneys last swept? What is the exact distance between the top of the chimneys and the roof ridge? This distance must be an absolute minimum of 1.8 metres, I was told. Well, I had not been on the roof ridge at all, let alone with a measuring rule, so I could not answer, but knew just from looking that the distance was much less than 1.8 metres.

Endsleigh, very good for let properties, was reputed to offer cover for thatched homes too. “We’re very sorry,” they said, “we don’t offer that any more”. Insurers’ reluctance has increased because of a spate of roof fires caused by sparks from wood-burning stoves. The open fires that were the norm two hundred years ago did not generate nearly as much intense heat as modern wood-burning stoves, several insurers told me. Checking the Endsleigh thatched property insurance page today, I read: “Our thatched roof insurance is currently unavailable”.

Towergate Insurance still has a thatched home policy, but the terms illustrate the continuing obligations on owners. Before a property is accepted, thatch over 10 years old must be inspected and repaired or replaced, depending on the outcome of the inspection. Fire retardant must be applied, and the chimneys must be swept at least once a year. For an intending purchaser, who needs to insure before exchange of contracts, the cost of re-thatching a home you do not yet own is off-putting, to say the least.

To be on the receiving end of all these ‘No’, ‘No’, No’s’ was quite depressing, but indicative of the new world of limited or zero insurance cover.

So, goodbye thatch. Inevitably, thatched roofs will be replaced with slates or tiles, and an important part of the UK’s architectural history will be confined to folk museums.

[i] Late in June 2013 the UK government and insurance companies agreed to form a new fund called Flood Re, to offer flood cover to homes that the companies would normally refuse to insure. Annual premiums will be in the range £210 to £540 initially. A levy on insurers will finance Flood Re. The money will come, essentially, from higher premiums on home policies. There are exclusions – homes in the highest council tax band, H in England, and all homes built since January 1st 2009, are not covered.