Today, we're announcing Stand: property insurance for those impacted by climate-driven disasters. The growing impacts of wind, wildfire, and flood are pushing insurers out of markets, when that safety net is needed most. This can't be solved with insurers' typical tools. 🧵

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Please read more in-depth here as we roll this out over the coming months.

If you are actively working on research or have been part of recent cuts, and would like to help us keep this data available for the world’s researchers, please reach out to us at datacommons@getstand.com. We’d love to work with you.

Internally, we’ve been working to aggregate, clean, and centralize these datasets as part of our internal pipeline. We now hope these will become important tools to support the ecosystem, ensuring the availability of datasets that power billions of dollars of climate research.

This federal data—such as those from NOAA, USGS, the U.S. Forest Service, LANDFIRE—are the backbone of climate risk science. We, along with researchers across the country, are increasingly concerned about its long-term stability and reliability.

At Stand, we build models to understand and mitigate climate risk. Our work depends on an ecosystem of publicly available environmental data, now subject to risk of federal funding cuts. To protect that data and support climate research, we are introducing a Climate Data Commons.

RT @CNBC: LA wildfires thrust insurance startup into spotlight as property owners scramble for protection

RT @kristoncapps: A modern home in Pacific Palisades survived the fire while all the homes around it burned. It was luck, but also it was b….

RT @Osint613: WATCH . A view of a firefighting airdrop from inside the C-130.

Done right, both insurers and reinsurers can incorporate these new views of risk, providing financial relief to homeowners. And this can be done today in any neighborhood that’s losing its insurance coverage.

Instead of waiting for more fires to “test” these models, forward-looking physics models can understand what these new characteristics would mean in these events.

Unfortunately, it often takes many years for reinsurance markets to recover and “soften” to lower levels, as the risk is better understood. This can mean many years of distressed insurance markets, well beyond LA, leaving our homeowners exposed.

With the right *physical* design, we can limit wildfire spread to very few homes. This would fundamentally change the “tail risk”, and thus should lead to massive reductions in reinsurance costs and, as a result, lower homeowners insurance for homeowners.

This doesn’t need to be true. We need to rethink our attitudes toward mitigation, at a neighborhood and individual home level. Homes don’t need to be concrete bunkers – they can be beautiful *and* resilient.

When these events happen (also in 2017 and 2018), it puts huge stress on reinsurers, which causes them to increase prices and remove coverage. That leaves primary insurers further exposed with much higher costs, and when they can’t recoup those costs, they leave the state.

This “tail risk” is managed with reinsurance, where one collects these tail risks together from uncorrelated events – wildfires, hurricanes, cyber risk, etc. In high wildfire-risk regions, this can represent 50-80% of the costs of insuring a home.

In the case of Pacific Palisades, *any* wildfire in high-wind conditions was likely to lead to nearly *all* homes being lost – so insuring 100 $5m homes in the area would lead to a $500m loss. That’s likely the equivalent 1,000 years of profits, gone instantly.

The #1 risk factor for homes lost in Paradise during the Camp fire was the proximity of a neighbors’ home. If you’re close to your neighbor and their home is burning, the thermal load on yours is almost guaranteed to cause ignition.

Pacific Palisades was not only already highly at risk of wildfire, but the homes were packed incredibly close together. And many had all the characteristics of high-risk homes (e.g., very little mitigation).