Risk Analytics and Innovation for Community Climate Adaptation (2024-2025)
This project examined how climate change is reshaping the long-term insurability of communities in the United States, with a focus on North Carolina. With extreme weather events already causing hundreds of billions of dollars in losses annually and private insurers increasingly withdrawing from high-risk areas, the team asked how insurance models might adapt to better support vulnerable communities. The research explored whether insurers can play a larger role in reducing risk, through sharing data, informing adaptation strategies, and piloting innovative models such as community-based catastrophe insurance, while also considering how public programs could be reformed to address mounting coverage gaps.
The team’s work produced three key outcomes. First, students mapped gaps in climate resilience technical assistance and flood insurance coverage, creating a searchable database of national programs and a StoryMap of North Carolina’s insurance landscape. This analysis combined data from federal and state sources to identify where coverage shortfalls are most acute, particularly in socially vulnerable communities. Second, the team advanced methods for flood risk communication by overlaying compound flood models with building-level data under current and projected conditions. Their workflow provides a scalable tool for quantifying flood exposure, with direct applications for resilience planning and infrastructure investment.
Finally, students explored the potential of Community-Based Catastrophe Insurance (CBCI) as an alternative risk management tool. Their analysis considered how CBCI could serve high-wealth, mixed-income, and low-income communities, especially renters often excluded from traditional insurance markets. They designed financing models that incorporate local government subsidies and community contributions, as well as a survey protocol to measure community willingness to participate in such programs. Together, these efforts demonstrate how new insurance approaches could close protection gaps, incentivize climate adaptation, and offer faster, fairer recovery for those most at risk.
Timing
Summer 2024 – Spring 2025
Team Outputs
Climate Resilience Technical Assistance program data
StoryMap
North Carolina Compound Flooding report
Developing a Community-Based Insurance Model survey protocol
This Team in the News
Environmental Law and Policy Clinic Summer 2024 Intern Spotlight: Jazmine Pritchett MEM ’25
In Flood-Prone Parts of North Carolina, Climate Adaptation Meets the Data Gap
See related Data+ summer project, Making Climate Hazard Risk Data Useful for North Carolina Communities (2024).
Image: Community Disaster Resilience Zones in North Carolina