Business
The insurance protection gap
WWF: Extreme weather costs are undermining the insurance sector.
16 January 2026
As property insurance in New York gets more expensive and harder to obtain, a first-of-its-kind study shows that making major fossil fuel corporations pay their fair share of the damages from worsening climate disasters could save New Yorkers money and inject billions of dollars into the state’s economy.
Greenline Insights has released a new study analysing the economic benefits of the Climate Accountability and Loss Recovery Act (Senate Bill 8585/Assembly Bill 9279), which would empower the state to recoup the climate change-related costs of extreme weather disasters from large fossil fuel corporations — rather than those costs being passed on to everyday New Yorkers through rising property insurance premiums and dropped coverage.
The study finds that a successful lawsuit against large fossil fuel corporations for climate-related insurance losses could deliver significant financial benefits to New York households and drive economic growth in the state.
Benefits include $3.8 billion in damages recovered; $340 for the average New Yorker; $2.7 billion in economic growth in the state and up to 11,900 new jobs.
The study analyses state data on insured losses from extreme weather disasters between 2019 and 2023, including Hurricane Ida, as well as attribution science that measures climate change’s contribution to those disasters.
It incorporates state-of-the-art modelling by Verisk, a leading insurance industry data analytics firm, that projects the insurance losses that would be expected if another major hurricane struck New York.
It then calculates the wide-ranging economic benefits if the fossil fuel industry paid its fair share of the insurance losses stemming from climate change’s contribution to worsening hurricanes.
If passed, the Climate Accountability and Loss Recovery Act would empower legal cases that inject new money into the state’s economy after the next climate disaster, rather than the status quo of the public paying for climate change through higher insurance premiums.
‘Everyday New Yorkers are being forced to pick up the tab for climate change through rising home insurance premiums, while the companies most responsible for it pay nothing.
‘Making the fossil fuel industry pay its fair share would turn financial losses into economic gains — it would mean more money in the pockets of New York families and more money circulating in local economies.’
RICHARD WILES
President of the Center for Climate Integrity
As extreme weather gets more damaging, premiums rise and the Trump administration dismantles federal disaster aid, New York is joining states like California and Hawai’i in advancing legislation aimed at making Big Oil pay for climate damages upending property insurance nationwide.
Internal industry documents show that the oil and gas giants have known for decades that their products would supercharge extreme weather disasters, but they deceived the public about the problem and undermined efforts to transition to clean energy.
A 1998 ‘scenario planning’ study from Shell even predicted lawsuits stemming from growing insurance losses due to worsening Atlantic hurricanes.
A March statewide poll by Data For Progress found that more than two-thirds of New York voters support the idea of suing Big Oil to recover the climate-related costs of extreme weather disasters.
Home insurance premiums are rising twice as fast as inflation in the USA, as insurers pass the escalating costs of extreme weather disasters on to their customers through higher rates. In New York, the average homeowner is paying $1,000 more annually since Hurricane Ida — which was made worse by climate change — caused about $9 billion in damage in the state.
The issue isn’t just affecting homeowners. The cost of insuring a multifamily building more than doubled in Brooklyn between 2020 and 2023. Landlords are increasingly passing those costs onto tenants through higher rents, fueling the stateʻs housing affordability crisis.
At a New York State Senate hearing last November, insurance industry representatives said more frequent damaging weather events are a core driver of higher premiums. According to testimony from the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, New York did not experience more than three billion-dollar weather events in a single year between 1980 to 2003. But in 2024 the state saw 10 separate natural disasters that each caused over a billion dollars in inflation-adjusted losses.
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