ABSTRACT
Large economic losses from weather and climate hazards primarily arise from two long standing socio-economic factors: degree of urbanization and value at risk. More recently, cascading and compounding nature of recent climate events across global, regional, national and local scales are increasingly seen as fundamental characteristics of climate-related risks. These challenges illustrate the need not only to design systems "for" change but to design robust evidence-based systems that inform planning "through" changes as new risks emerge. At the same time, governments at every level are increasingly asked to balance the need to protect consumers from high insurance rates with the need to keep insurance companies from going out of business, and thus the public ends up acting as the insurer of last resort. There is a strong need for these actors to collectively view systematic and reliable historic and forward-looking risk exposure data as investments across the risk to resilience continuum rather than as costs. This chapter describes the drivers, economic impact assessment approaches, and financial services including flood and drought insurance, that have been employed for managing weather and climate risks at the national level in the United States, and outlines the analytical and decision making challenges and opportunities therein.
