too, are facing insurance pullbacks.
The attempts by insurers to recalibrate for a warmer
world are spurring a furious backlash from property own-
ers. In California, both the push and the pushback are
playing out on two fronts. One comprises the communi-
ties whose homeowners and businesspeople are losing
their policies. In 2019, the most recent year for which
data is available, insurers declined to renew the home-
owners policies of 235,274 Californians, according to the
California Department of Insurance. Though that’s only
about 3% of the 8.6 million Californians who had such
policies, it represented a 31% jump in nonrenewals from
2018, with most of the increase coming from areas of
high wildfire threat. The fire-insurance fallout, moreover,
is compounding a statewide housing shortage; in many
pockets of the state the difficulty of obtaining coverage is
constraining new construction, a further climate-induced
economic squeeze.
The other front is Sacramento, where a battle is
unfolding with important implications for other regionstains to exurbs ringing Los Angeles, from vineyards in
the Napa and Sonoma valleys to ski resorts overlooking
Lake Tahoe, from beach towns to hilly enclaves such as
Portola Valley.
Facing this onslaught, the insurance industry is start-
ing to change what it sells and to whom. In the process,
it is emerging as perhaps the world’s most aggressive
force pushing society to confront the costs of a chang-
ing climate. Insurers are racing to modernize the models
they use to assess wildfire danger—models that, in the
era before runaway climate change, had lagged behind
those they use to predict hurricanes and earthquakes.
They are pressing homeowners to “harden” their homes
against fire—to replace wood roofs with ones made of fire-
resistant materials, to slash vegetation bordering exterior
walls, even to add expensive yard-sprinkler systems that
can be turned on, like a Tesla, from afar by phone. When
all else fails, insurers are jettisoning clients like Babb and
Aloisio—people whose homes, the companies have con-
cluded, now are too likely to go up in smoke. Businesses,
FIGHTING FUTURE FIRES A fire protection crew in Portola Valley removes trees and brush to reduce risk of a roadside blaze.