Market Forces

Insured solutions: How insurance-based tools can unlock climate tech

By / Published: October 30, 2024

This blog was authored by Peter Tufano, Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and Senior Advisor to the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, with support from the Environmental Defense Fund, including Andrew Howell, Senior Director for Sustainable Finance.  Any references below do not constitute an endorsement of the firms or products mentioned.  

This is the second in a multi-part series on how insurers can support the energy transition. The series explores climate-related opportunities and challenges and highlights emerging insurance innovations. This will help us build a greater understanding about how the insurance industry can support emissions reductions and new climate solutions. In this second post of the series, we discuss how insurance can support the emergence and scalability of clean tech solutions and innovations.

To combat climate change and adapt to a warming planet, we need new technologies that have yet to be invented, piloted, or commercialized. According to the International Energy Agency’s 2020 estimates for its Sustainable Development Scenario of net-zero by 2070, nearly three-quarters of the innovations needed to reduce emissions by 35 gigaton (billion tonnes) per year by 2070 are still far from commercialization. If we include innovations to help us adapt to the changing world, the technological gap is likely much larger, with a recent Global Adaptation & Resilience Investment (GARI) working group study suggesting that only 11% of firms offer “adaptation solutions” products. This call for innovation may not sound immediately relevant to the insurance industry, but it is.  

Conversations around insurance and climate change typically focus on how insurers can reduce emissions from firms that they finance or insure (in their roles as investors and insurers, respectively). They examine how insurers measure climate risks and signal these risks through premia they charge, or how insurers can make coverage more available and affordable as climate intensifies extreme weather. But insurers in the climate space have another role: to support needed technological innovation through “insured solutions.”   

How can insurers help support innovators? Surely, it’s not possible to “insure” the success of new ventures? Correct! But to make projects easier to finance, insurers can derisk climate innovations by applying risk engineering approaches and offering new contracts to offload certain risks.  

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The Power of Electricity Modeling in the U.S. Clean Energy Transition

By / Bio / Twitter profile / Published: September 17, 2024

The journey toward a clean energy economy is complex and filled with technical, economic, and social challenges. Electricity models are key tools for driving this transformation, providing precision and insight into the potential outcomes of energy policies and technological shifts. At the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), we are working to make these tools more accessible through the U.S. Model Intercomparison Project (MIP), which brings together leading developers of open-source planning models to help steer the nation toward a sustainable energy future.  Read More »

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How insurance innovation can drive decarbonization

By / Bio / Published: September 10, 2024

This blog was authored by Talley Burley, Manager, Climate Risk & Insurance; Carolyn Kousky, Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy; and Leslie Labruto, Managing Director, Sustainable Finance. 

This is the first in a multi-part series on how insurers can support the energy transition. The series will explore opportunities and challenges and highlight emerging insurance innovations. This will help us build a greater understanding about how the insurance industry, long overlooked as a potential core contributor, can drive emissions reductions. In this first post of the series, we discuss tools that are available to insurers to support the energy transition. 

You’ve heard this before. Climate change-driven events — wildfires, hailstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods — have devastated lives and communities across the country, straining local economies and households as infrastructure, homes, and other personal effects are damaged and destroyed. Mounting costs from extreme weather events have significantly impacted the insurance industry, leading to rising costs and leaving many without sufficient insurance coverage to rebuild. In 2023 natural hazards accounted for $250 billion in economic losses, with insurers and reinsurers paying $95 billion globally. According to a report by SwissRe, insured losses from natural hazards have grown by about 5-7% annually since 1992. Human-driven climate change will continue to lead to more intense and frequent natural hazards. Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by about 8% since 1990, and today those emissions are the highest they have been in human history. Without significantly greater efforts to reduce global emissions, climate change will only continue to drive costs and strain the insurance sector.  

What will it take to reverse these trends? Transformational action and an all-hands-on-deck approach from market sector forces and actors is needed. This includes the insurance industry. While insurance plays a vital role in supporting disaster recovery and resilience, the insurance sector also has a variety of tools and levers it can use to drive the adoption of low-emission, energy-efficient practices.  

As the insurance industry faces a period of unprecedented disruption in the face of climate change, insurance markets must evaluate, test and learn from a series of six levers that can make them part of the solution, while also helping their firms, their clients, and their communities remain leaders in innovation and competitiveness.   Read More »

Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Energy Transition / Leave a comment

Navigating a Just Labor Transition: Unveiling the JLT Progress Scale and Strategies for a Fairer Future

By / Bio / Twitter profile / Published: August 21, 2024

This blog was authored by Brigitte Castañeda and Minwoo Hyun, former EDF Doctoral Interns, Raphael Heffron, Professor at the Universite de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, and by Environmental Defense Fund economist, Luis Fernández Intriago.

As temperatures rise globally, the energy sector stands clearly accountable, putting a critical spotlight on the need for a just energy transition. In particular, the ongoing strikes and labor disputes within the energy sector emphasize the urgent necessity of ensuring an equitable workforce transition. Our new Environmental Defense Fund Economics Discussion Paper: “A Global and Inclusive Just Labor Transition: Challenges and Opportunities in Developing and Developed Countries,” addresses this by evaluating labor policies in both developed and developing countries, introducing the Just Labor Transition Progress Scale to assess their energy transition efforts.

From the experience of the energy transition in developed countries, we find that a successful Just Transition for labor markers in energy sectors requires robust government leadership, financial support, inclusive local consultations, a well-structured taxation framework, evaluation of social security and labor regulations, and a focus on economic diversification to create alternative (and green) job opportunities. Developing countries transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy face further and particular challenges due to having higher informal employment and less social protection. For example, coal-dependent countries are at higher risk due to characteristics that include labor-intensive and low-skilled jobs and geographic concentration, while oil-dependent countries face less disruption with more specialized roles. Overall, careful planning is crucial to maintaining affordability, accessibility, and inclusive employment, particularly in countries with concentrated fossil fuel jobs. Targeted strategies and economic diversification are two policy actions needed to ensure a Just Labor Transition (JLT).

This is why we propose a decision-making policy tool called the Just Labor Transition Progress Scale (JLTPS) to evaluate national progress toward a just labor transition. Our results highlight that most developing countries are at the beginner or moderate stage, while developed countries are at the intermediate stage, with very few at an advanced stage. Read More »

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Clearing the Air: How New Rules for Oil & Gas Facilities Offer Major Wins for the Environment and Economy

By / Bio / Published: June 7, 2024

This blog post was authored by Lauren Beatty, High Meadows Postdoctoral Economics Fellow and Aaron Wolfe, Senior Economics and Policy Analyst.

Image by freepik

Methane pollution caused by oil and gas production in the U.S. is a major contributor to climate change and releases health-harming pollution into nearby communities. New EPA rules are projected to slash methane emissions from covered sources by 80%.  

Between 2024 to 2038, EPA projects a reduction of 58 million tons of methane—equivalent to removing nearly a billion cars from the roads for a year—along with slashing 16 million tons of smog-forming volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions and 590,000 tons of air toxics. Many of the common-sense measures in the rules will lead to economic and environmental benefits for Americans and have already been adopted by leading states and operators. They also result in capturing otherwise wasted gas. EPA estimates that by 2033, increased recovery of gas will offset $1.4 billion per year of their compliance costs. 

In response to arguments from the oil and gas industry that the rules will harm operators, EDF’s Economics team analyzed the economic impacts of the regulations, including their effect on small producers, marginal wells, and consumers. We found that: 

  • The regulations have low compliance costs, which are further offset by profits from captured gas and are not expected to influence operational decisions by oil and gas producers;  
  • Marginal wells are provided significant flexibility and are not expected to face significant compliance difficulties; and   
  • The regulations will cause no perceivable oil and gas price increase for consumers. 

Our conclusions are consistent with EPA’s own analysis and bolstered by the experience in leading states where similar methane regulations have been in effect for years without hindering production or harming the industry. 

Read More »

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Empowering Chile’s Climate Action: A Citizen’s Guide to Article 6

By / Bio / Twitter profile / Published: April 18, 2024

This blog was authored by Francisco Pinto and Rodrigo Bórquez, economists of the Climate Action Teams (CAT) initiative, and by Environmental Defense Fund economist Luis Fernández Intriago.

Source: Climate Action Teams

Reducing emissions is imperative to address climate change. The mechanisms established in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement can serve as vital tools in our quest to stop the impacts of climate change and safeguard the future of our planet—but navigating its complexities can be tricky.

To tackle this challenge, between June and August 2023, the Climate Action Teams (CAT-Chile) initiative, co-founded by EDF, and the Consensus Building Institute (CBI) conducted a dialogue process in Chile. We aimed to convene key players in a discussion to better understand Article 6’s potential to boost Chile’s climate ambition.

This fruitful dialogue, called “Climate Dialogue: Strengthening Chile’s Ambition through Article 6 of the Paris Agreement“, explored three specific areas:

  1. The feasibility of implementing Article 6 in Chile,
  2. The application of safeguards, and
  3. The short-term actions and tasks to progress in this field.

The dialogue’s outcomes were delivered to Chile’s Ministry of the Environment to consider as they prepared to host their own public-private sector dialogue on ideas around the development of a Chilean Article 6 policy. Read More »

Posted in Economics, Energy Transition, International, Uncategorized / Leave a comment