About

Project History

This project was begun by Evan Mills in the very early 1990s, leading to a paper in 1994 on the non-energy benefits of energy efficient technologies—including risk management—and an initial article [PDF] dedicated to the insurance dimensions in 1996. We worked through the late 1990s and up to 2001 on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's chapter [PDF] on insurance industry vulnerabilities to climate change, followed in 2005 by our article in the journal SCIENCE [PDF]. Other activities focused on availability and affordability, the "greening" of insurance, emerging liability risks, regulatory issues, and risk modeling, and related topics.

Sponsors

Two construction workers building the roof of a new house; An aerial view of a flooded town.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was the first sponsor of our insurance-related work at LBNL, joining the project in 1997. Further support soon followed from the U.S. Department of Energy. Ceres provided critical support from the NGO world beginning in 2005 after federal interest in the topic waned.

Acknowledgments

We have had the privilege of working with wonderful co-authors on various studies and reports, and have benefitted from considerable efforts on the part of insurance industry representatives to gather data and provide insights and critical review of our reports. Many of these collaborators are listed here.