Australians are familiar with natural disasters: flood, cyclone, and drought tragedies regularly feature in our news coverage. And the evidence indicates climate change is making many of them worse. We're lucky that most of us tend to escape with their lives intact. Our homes, though – and our investments in them - don't always fare so well.
Residents of northern Australia discovered this the hard way when home insurance premiums rose rapidly between 2005 and 2013, mostly due to cyclone risk - some complained of fivefold rises that left them unable to afford insurance.
A subsequent Australian Government Actuary review confirmed that far North residents paid much more than their more southern counterparts and premiums had risen quickly over the past few years.
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But were they being "gouged" by unscrupulous insurers? If only it were so simple. The AGA also found the size of payouts for cyclone damage was escalating. Between 2005-06 and 2012-13, insurers had paid out $1.40 to their customers for every $1 they'd received in premiums. No business can tolerate that sort of loss for long.
Though the influence of climate change on cyclones is hard to identify, it's broadly expected we will see more severe cyclones – and they will move further south. We also know that other hazards such as coastal erosion, bushfire, intense rainfall and storm surges are all likely to become increasingly problematic in the coming decades. You'd think, at the very least, we'd avoid building housing – and approving mortgages - in areas vulnerable to climate and climate change impacts. But a messy interaction of local, state and federal government policies has continued to enable risky developments.
For example, a development application for residential apartments in the floodplains of the Gold Coast suburb of Carrara was approved in 2013 -- with the proviso that it include a helipad, two evacuation boats, and three days' worth of safe water supplies for 80 per cent of the residents. The council's reasoning for such an extraordinary decision was that rejecting the development application outright may have been costly to defend.
Many people are unaware of their exposure to evolving hazards such as coastal erosion, and even historical flood information is limited in some areas.
It's a familiar theme in recent reviews of natural disasters: home-owners too often don't realise the risk until their insurance premium rises suddenly, or even until disaster actually strikes.
There are many examples of policymakers and the private sector trying to address this problem – raise awareness, change policies, ensure that homes are built in safer places and to safer standards. Insurers, investors, and some of the larger property developers have participated in such efforts. However one stakeholder that has been relatively quiet is the banks.
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In Australia, banks require you to have home insurance before approving a mortgage. Yet they do not check, in subsequent years, whether you are still insured.
Our research identified only one example of the banking sector formally addressing their role in relation to housing at risk of extreme weather. In response to a government issues paper following the 2011 floods, banks denied they were at risk themselves, or should play a part in reducing risk through means such as annually checking insurance coverage of mortgagors.
Yet, in climate-related disclosure statements, most big banks acknowledge risk from increasing natural disasters due to climate change affecting their mortgage books. In recent years, some have had to provision for bad debts related to big floods. So far these have been small amounts, but as natural disasters become more problematic, will that always be the case?
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