Contemporary wisdom holds that everyday consumers are often naive about exactly how insurance works — a main reason agents and brokers continue to be essential despite the rise of self-service, digital-insurance platforms.
But one thing most everyone is aware of these days is the growing impact of climate change, whether from personal experience or the dramatic images of storms, fires and floods that now punctuate the daily news cycle.
The impact of climate change is becoming even more talked about in 2024 as the majority of insurance customers experience premium increases driven in part by the rising costs associated with catastrophes, not to mention the trouble some people have even finding sufficient insurance in locations where some carriers deem the natural-disaster risk to be greater than the potential business benefits of extending coverages there.
Author and journalist Abrahm Lustgarten argued in his recent book "On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; March 26, 2024), that the years to come may see millions of people relocate to get away from punishing storms, drought, flooding and fires.
"In 2021, there were already more than a million people in the United States displaced by natural disasters. The disaster refugees of today offer a glimpse of what may soon be even larger groups of refugees displaced by slower-moving, subtler rises in temperature and worsening droughts," Lustgarten writes. "The places around the world we think we can live in now will not be the same as the places where we will be able to live in the future."
Data, however, can empower people who hope to stay put. World Population Review recently tabulated how many declared disasters have unfolded in each U.S. state since 1953. The slideshow above illustrates the states that are statistically least likely to be impacted by climate change, according to research conducted and published by World Population Review.
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