Our Project
The project’s overarching goal is to increase the financial resilience of low- and moderate-income households in New York City to escalating flood risk through the use of inclusive insurance. Inclusive insurance refers to any program or policy that makes insurance coverage available to those previously locked out of the insurance market. Internationally, there has been a growing movement to identify low-cost insurance designs and establish public-private partnerships that can guarantee a more equitable recovery, however, these innovations have yet to be widely adopted in the US. Our project will establish NYC as one of the first local governments in the US to harness these approaches.
This project is a joint effort between the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency (MOCR), and the Center for New York City Neighborhoods (CNYCN). It also involves research and development work with Global Parametrics, technical assistance from Guy Carpenter, and support from the NYC Office of Management and Budget. Our work will be informed by an advisory board of subject-matter experts.
Stage 2 Components
Deploy Innovative Insurance Pilots
The key pilot will be the purchase, by CNYCN, of a parametric flood insurance policy designed to rapidly provide emergency cash grants to LMI households in the event of a flood. In addition, R&D will be undertaken on parametric flood policies that community development finance institutions can provide to protect LMI borrowers.
Create a Community of Practice
Harnessing risk transfer for social recovery goals, the community will facilitate knowledge sharing, spur the generation of new knowledge, enable dialogue, connect people, and support collaboration. This community will be developed through a workshop and new information sharing platforms – including educational tools, case studies, and interviews.
Link Research to Actionable Change
Three research projects will be undertaken, including a survey to quantify the length of delays in various sources of disaster recovery dollars and the costs from these delays; a replicability and generalizability analysis of the project’s insurance pilots; and a typology of the community-level benefits of widespread insurance purchase.
Increase Literacy and Capacity
This includes training housing advisors to address escalating flood risk and flood insurance, providing pre-disaster consultations to fifty NYC households on risk reduction and insurance, and expanding the information available on FloodHelpNY.org, the local flood risk awareness platform.
Project Advisory Board
Lloyd Dixon
RAND
Elizabeth Malone
Neighborhood Housing Services of Brooklyn
Reese May
SBP
Marion McFadden
Enterprise Community Partners
Fid Norton
ClimaSure
Philip Orton
Stevens Institute of Technology
Lori Peek
Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado Boulder
Joe Rossi
Joe Flood Insurance