Avoiding an Uninsurable Future and Related Threats to Our Financial System: A Conversation with Dave Jones
Event Overview
As climate change drives more frequent and severe weather events and insurance companies respond by withdrawing, reducing, or charging more for home insurance coverage, reduced access to insurance is a growing threat to financial stability.
In the US, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) began to acknowledge this threat in 2022 and described this as a growing source of concern for the US economy and financial system. Yet, FSOC recommendations focused primarily on building the capacities of the largest financial institutions to manage these risks, with little to no attention to addressing a primary source of these risks - carbon emissions and the financing of fossil fuel and other carbon-intensive activities.
In this webinar, Dave Jones discusses how existing resilience and adaptation measures are overwhelmed by the rise in losses driven by climate change due to our failure to address underlying causes, notably fossil fuel emissions. Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law's Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE), Dave continues to lead and supports efforts in the US to publicize the growing threat to financial stability and reduce sources of climate risk.
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The Panel
Dave Jones is Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE). He was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021 and a Distinguished Fellow with the Climate Works Foundation. Jones was California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 through 2018, where he pioneered insurance regulatory practices to address climate risk and founded the international consortium of insurance regulators focused on climate risk, the Sustainable Insurance Forum. Jones has testified before Congress, state legislatures, the G-20 Financial Stability Board, and numerous regulatory agencies, about the need for financial regulators to address climate change and the risks it poses to the financial system. He is a member of the UN Forum for Insurance Transition (UN FIT) and the Expert Group advising the UN Task Force on Net Zero Policy. The Washington Post identified Jones as one 50 people shaping society in 2026. His most recent article on climate risk and insurance is published in the Yale Law Journal: "The Uninsurable Future: The Climate Threat to Property Insurance and How to Stop It." Jones has degrees from DePauw University (B.A.) and Harvard University (JD/MPP).
Anne Perrault is the former Senior Climate Policy Counsel at Public Citizen and former Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Climate Center. She is also the former Director of International Financial Institutions at the Center for International Environmental Law. She currently serves on the Beyond Bretton Woods Steering Committee.
Hosted by Beyond Bretton Woods (BBW), a think tank that challenges the current international financial architecture and proposes a radical paradigm shift to ensure a world with equitable, eco-centric, and regenerative systems that serve the interests of humanity and nature.
Sponsors
Sponsored by Global Citizen and Middlebury College