Integrating Natural Flood Protection into Community Based Catastrophe Insurance: Coastal Louisiana Phase One Pilot
The Challenge
Coastal Louisiana’s communities are experiencing more intense and frequent coastal hazards. Within days after an acute flood event occurs, low and moderate-income families struggle to navigate displacement, temporary unemployment, and lack of information. Traditional insurance, while more reliable and comprehensive than federal disaster relief, can still be confusing, opaque, prohibitively expensive, and take months or years to resolve a claim and receive funds.
The Approach
The Center, Verisk, and Guy Carpenter have received funding support from the Walton Family Foundation to bring a community-based catastrophe insurance policy to coastal Louisiana. This pilot will lay the groundwork with a community to design, scope, and structure a potential policy. However, many of the flood protection measures that serve rural coastal Louisiana communities are natural marsh systems and nature-based approaches which are not easily or commonly integrated into national and international modeling efforts that assess risk. The project team will identify potential mechanisms to incorporate Louisiana’s extensive coastal monitoring data and modeling products into private sector catastrophe models to value the flood risk reduction of nature-based solutions and incorporate those into insurance pricing.
Stayed tuned for updates as we move forward!
Partners and Funding
The Center is partnering with Guy Carpenter and Verisk on this project. Funding is provided by the Walton Family Foundation.
KEY TEAM MEMBERS
