Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

California’s Insurance Overhaul Came Too Late

Private providers have started returning to the fire-ravaged state, but its insurer of last resort still has huge and growing exposure.

Los Angeles fire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The massive wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in Southern California may deal a devastating blow to the state’s fragile home insurance market, which is in the midst of large-scale reforms as part of an effort to lure private insurers back to the state.

In the years running up to yesterday’s, today’s, and likely tomorrow’s fires, several home insurers announced plans to stop writing new policies in California, or even leave the state entirely. The industry and many analysts blamed not just California’s famously hostile mix of dry vegetation, high winds, and scarce rains,but also a rise in construction and reinsurance costs and a regulatory system that made it difficult for insurers to raise rates or think prospectively about risk when setting rates.

In other words, it was simply easier for insurers to not renew policies than it was for them to increase rates to better adjust for risk. Some of these non-renewals occurred in the area now affected by the Eaton Fire in Altadena, though they were most prevalent in the Bay Area and the Sierra Nevada foothills.

In response, California’s insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara rolled out a set of reforms last year thattried to both expand insurance in wildfire prone areas and lure insurers back to the state. The new rules would allow insurers to use models to determine risk (not just historical data, as the law had previously been interpreted to allow) while also mandating that insurance companies operating in the state write policies in fire-prone areas as well as in those that are relatively safe. Lara thenissued another rule late last year allowing insurers to use the cost of reinsurance in determining their rates, which insurers in the rest of the country are allowed to do.

Allstate, which announced in November, 2022 that it would stop writing new home insurance policies in California, said last spring that it was considering a return to the state based on the possibility of models being allowed for ratemaking. At the end of last year, partly in response to the reforms, Farmers also said that it would restart writing new policies for some lines of business in California, and that it would increase the number of new homeowners insurance policies it writes every month after instituting limits in 2023. Last week, Verisk submitted a model to project wildfire risk to the state for regulatory agency review for use in rate-setting.

Get the best of Heatmap in your inbox daily.

* indicates required
  • Consumer advocates have warned that these rules would lead to increases in insurance rates. So has Lara’s predecessor, Dave Jones, who has been skeptical of trying to grow the private insurance market by giving it more flexibility to set rates without addressing the core issues of climate change and fire management policy.

    “In the long term, we’re not going to be able to ‘rate increase’ ourselves out of this problem,” he said in an interview with the University of California, pointing to Florida’s insurance problems as an example, despite the flexibility that insurers have in setting rates there. “In the short-and mid-term for California, giving insurers proposed higher rates will get them to start writing new insurance again — although many homes in the wildland urban interface will continue to face challenges. But in the longer term, higher rates alone are likely to be overwhelmed by the higher risks and losses from climate changejust like in Florida.”

    Like Florida, California has a backup for the private market, an insurer of last resort. And, like Florida, it’s been trying to make it smaller, to little avail. It may now be so large as to place the rest of the state at financial risk.

    California’s FAIR Plan is a fire insurance pool that all property and casualty insurers operating in the state contribute to in proportion to how much business they have in the state; homeowners turn to FAIR when they can’t get insurance otherwise. As the state has experienced massive wildfires and insurers have pulled out, the size of the FAIR Plan has ballooned, with exposure rising to $458 billion in 2024 from $153 billion in 2020, even as it explicitly says that its “goal is attrition” (i.e. getting customers back on normal insurance plans).

    “It’s a socialized cost,” Kate Gordon, the chief executive of California Forward, a policy nonprofit, and former advisor to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, told me. “We see more and more people switching to the FAIR plan. It’s getting massively oversubscribed. It’s going to hit some kind of wall at some point.”

    The communities with the most wildfire exposure for the insurer include vacation areas throughout the state such as Lake Arrowhead, Truckee, and Big Bear Lake, and affluent residential communities including Berkeley and the San Francisco suburb Orinda. They also include Pacific Palisades, the fifth most wildfire-exposed market for FAIR in Southern California, with some $5.9 billion of exposure.

    While the fires have yet to be substantially contained, let alone extinguished, and the damage has not yet been calculated, the still-raging fires will likely constitute a major hit to the FAIR Plan and California insurers. The number of residential FAIR policies in the Pacific Palisades zip code grew by over 80% between 2023 and 2024, and has quadrupled since 2020. The total financial exposure for residential insurance in Pacific Palisades doubled in the past year, growing to almost $3 billion. In one zipcode affected by the fire in Altadena, residential FAIR plan policies grew by over 40% since 2020, with around $950 million of total exposure.

    “As the risk of more climate change-intensified wildfires increases in California, a major wildfire in one geographical area concentrated with FAIR Plan-insured properties could overwhelm the FAIR Plan’s reserves and its capacity to quickly and fully pay consumers’ claims,” Lara wrote in a bulletin in September.

    Like other states with insurers of last resort, the FAIR Plan can seek cash from insurers — which could, if the losses are large enough, extract “temporary supplemental fees from their own policyholders,” according to new California insurance regulations. This would mean that Californians who were able to buy private insurance — because they don’t live in a region of the state that insurers have abandoned — could be on the hook for massive wildfire losses. While such an assessment has not occurred since 1994, Victoria Roach, the FAIR Plan’s president, warned in a hearing before the State Assembly last March that a major fire could knock out the plan’s reserves and force it to go to insurers — and their policyholders — to shell out for the difference.

    You’re out of free articles.

    Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
    To continue reading
    Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
    or
    Please enter an email address
    By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
    Economy

    AM Briefing: Liberation Day

    On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

    Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

    President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Yellow
    Podcast

    The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

    Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

    Lee Zeldin.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

    It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Adaptation

    Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

    That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

    A barn.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

    Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Green