Ginny Cleaveland, Deputy Press Secretary, Fossil-Free Finance, Sierra Club, ginny.cleaveland@sierraclub.org, 415-508-8498 (Pacific Time)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — More than 75 advocacy and environmental groups including the Sierra Club have called on the U.S. Treasury Department to begin collecting consistent, comparable, and granular data to evaluate how climate change is harming insurance consumers.
- Read the letter here
In the letter, the groups, including Public Citizen, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, Hip Hop Caucus, and National Housing Resource Center, pushed the Treasury's Federal Insurance Office (FIO) to put specific focus on how low-income and traditionally underserved communities have been impacted by rate hikes by insurance providers.
"Across the country, insurers that fueled the climate crisis with their underwriting and investment decisions are now scrambling to protect their profits at the expense of communities harmed by climate-related disasters like hurricanes, torrential thunderstorms, and wildfires. Due to a history of racist policies and underinvestment, climate risks like flooding and wildfires disproportionately harm minority and low-income communities," reads the letter.
The groups call on FIO to strengthen the proposal by collecting data on the most vulnerable communities, including data on policies covering renters, consumers dependent on insurers of last resort, and climate-related perils like wildfires and wind, which are increasingly excluded from standard coverage. Further, the groups ask FIO to publish as much data as possible once it has been collected.
In addition to the group letter, more than 9,000 individuals signed a petition led by Public Citizen calling on the FIO to begin collecting ZIP Code level data from property and casualty insurers detailing current and historical underwriting of homeowners’ insurance.
The letter and petition come in response to FIO’s October 2022 proposal to collect data from insurers, allowing the office to assess climate-related financial risk across the United States. The data collection will inform the FIO’s assessments for potential major disruptions of private insurance, especially in areas particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, as outlined in President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk, issued in May 2021.
With the comment period closed, the FIO will review comments, consider changes to the data collected, and issue a finalized data collection template to insurers.
About the Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with millions of members and supporters. In addition to protecting every person's right to get outdoors and access the healing power of nature, the Sierra Club works to promote clean energy, safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and legal action. For more information, visit www.sierraclub.org.