As a follow up to my recent post, “Insurance, Risk and Climate Change,” I would offer into testimony a column appearing in the Times-Dispatch today, written by Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Hampton Roads environmental group.
The Virginia Department of Emergency Management has updated its storm surge projections, which had been using 1923 levels, to project that 100,000 residents of Hampton Roads would have to flee the region the next the region is directly hit by a hurricane, Stiles writes. That puts more people than ever on the roads, at the very time that the transportation infrastructure is threatened by sea-level rise.
A 2007 study for the U.S. Department of Transportation predicted that a 19-inch rise (less than the two feet projected by the Commission) would flood or put at risk 436 miles of Interstate highway and arterials in the region before any hurricane hits.
Of course, the impact of such a hurricane may not be as bad as it sounds. Rising sea levels threaten to inundate 760 square miles over the next 100 years and displace 48,000 to 150,000 Virginians by 2108, Stiles writes. Presumably the coastal dwellers would have enough sense not to move to new locations that placed them in harm’s way of a hurricane. But, then, you never know. You can rarely go wrong overestimating human stupidity.
The dollars at stake are immense. Last year, a European economic analysis valued Hampton Roads shoreline assets at risk as the 10th highest for any city in the world. No wonder, writes Stiles, that Allstate, Nationwide and State Farm, which account for 55 percent of the Mid-Atlantic’s insurance market, have stopped writing new policies in much of Tidewater.
To head off disaster, it is critical to allow insurance markets to function freely, sending out signals to developers and home buyers who might not otherwise get the message that coastal development is fraught with risk. Additionally,Stiles suggests some other ideas.
Begin with the mapping, research, and information gathering needed to test results from those large-scale studies and focus them down to street-level accuracy. Next: limit my grandchildren’s financial exposure by keeping buildings, facilities and infrastructure out of those areas where they will become flooded or unusable without significant public investment.
I know there are a lot of Global Warming skeptics among my readers. Indeed, I am one of those who distrusts the manner in which advocacy groups and the media have cherry picked the science to peddle alarmist scenarios to the public. But if there’s enough evidence to persuade the insurance industry that the risk of rising sea levels is real, we would be fools to ignore that risk out of ideological petulance. In contrast to the cap-and-trade legislation being discussed in Congress, Stiles’ proposals strike me as entirely prudent and appropriate for state government.
