I recently sat down with Remy Blaire, host of FinTech TV’s “Market Movers, the Opening Bell” to talk about climate change. Here’s a snippet from the interview:
Remy Blaire: First and foremost, we all know that climate change is taking place and we’re seeing headlines about the upcoming hurricane season. But when it comes to climate here on earth right now, we take a lot for granted. Tell us where we are in the overall cycle.
Jeff Gitterman: It’s so interesting. We were hunter-gatherers for as long as we existed until about 12,000 years ago when we noticed that the climate was stabilizing and we could start to make roots and build cities and build agri-farming because we didn’t have to move constantly because of temperature changes and weather changes.
And embedded in the current system of insurance, building, architecture and infrastructure is a stable climate that was incredibly predictive. One in 100 year storms happened about 1% of the time. And now that is changing and changing rapidly and we haven’t changed to adapt to it.
It’s just critical that we’re adaptable. We can’t look at the existing systems and rely on them to create the adaptation that we need. We have to start thinking for ourselves, understanding the current systems, reading the forward looking data sets, and become adaptable ourselves.
Don’t build a home on the coastline where we know erosion is taking place. Look, it’s a big problem, but it’s something that we can take some agency over and some control over by paying attention to what the scientists are saying and really focusing on what the insurance companies are doing, which is exiting states that are too risky. It’s a bellwether.
Watch our full conversation:
Read more: Climate change and homeowners insurance prices