Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Climate Proofers, the show all about those on the front lines of adaptation finance, tech, and policy. 0:12 My name's Louis Woodall, editor of Climate Proof, which you can read at www.climateproof.news. Last month, an anonymous memo from senior insurance insiders ricocheted around the internet. 0:24 Sounding the Alarm, published by the nonprofit InsideTrack, warned that the industry's default response to rising physical risks is to reprice, restrict, and retreat, a pattern that, if repeated, would leave households, businesses, and taxpayers to absorb the losses. 0:40 But as my guest today argues, the problem was never that we didn't know what was going on inside the insurance industry, it's that the pace of action hasn't matched what we do know. 0:49 Jacqueline DiMedici Bruneau is Director of Insurance at the sustainability nonprofit Ceres and has observed the insurance industry from almost every angle. 0:58 In our conversation, we dig into what the memo got right and where it fell short, discuss why we may need to lean on insurance regulators to make meaningful change across the industry happen, and explore what Ceres' own review of climate disclosures has to say about carriers' engagement with the climate risk and resilience challenge. 1:14 Before we get started, a reminder that Climate Proof has launched its end-of-year membership drive. 1:19 We're aiming to hit 350 paying members by January the 1st, 2027, and I'm sad to say we've actually lost some members since we started, meaning we have 47 new members to go if we are to hit our target. 1:31 If you're a regular listener and want to support Climate Proof as it grows into the go-to adaptation intelligence platform, then please consider upgrading today by heading over to www.climateproof.news/upgrade. 1:43 Thank you for backing us. Right, in a moment, my conversation with Jacqueline, but first, a rundown of last week's top adaptation and resilience stories. 1:51 [swoosh] In finance, the World Bank Group supplied $48 billion of climate finance from its own account in the year to end June, of which 15 billion went towards adaptation, according to an annual update published last Wednesday. 2:03 The bank also mobilized a record $48 billion of private capital with climate co-benefits, the total climate-related financing of $96 billion. That's 21% higher than the year prior. 2:15 The own account climate finance figure is equal to 44% of the bank's total commitments, a share just below the 45% climate lending target that the bank retired in June under pressure from the Trump administration. 2:26 [swoosh] In policy, the European Commission unveiled its long-awaited climate resilience framework last week, a package of legal proposals that would require European Union member states to plan for a world two degrees warmer by 2050. 2:38 At the heart of the framework is a climate resilience law, which would institute a single national strategic plan on climate resilience for each member state, together with an EU-wide strategy. 2:48 Member states would have to name which authorities own climate risks in each policy area, with the commission reviewing national progress every two years. 2:55 [swoosh] And in tech, the European Investment Fund committed 30 million euros to Pure Terra 2, a Dutch early-stage venture fund that backs water-saving and reuse technologies ready to move from pilot to industrial scale. 3:08 The investment aligns with EU policy priorities around water conservation and reuse. 3:13 For example, the commission estimates that compliance with existing water rules needs an additional 23 billion euros of investment a year. [swoosh] Right, that's it for this week's roundup. 3:21 Now on to my conversation with Jacqueline. [upbeat music] Hi, Jacqueline. Where are you calling from today, and what do you do? Hi, Louis. I'm calling from Wisconsin, actually a converted dairy barn, no less. 3:36 And I'm the Director of Insurance for Ceres. Thank you for being on the pod today. I can confirm to audio listeners that the backdrop of Jacqueline's converted dairy barn is something to behold. 3:47 [chuckles] I'm quite jealous of where you're based. Uh, thank you for being on today. 3:51 I wanted to talk with you about the state of play vis-a-vis insurance and climate risk, and this is in the context of a anonymous memo that made serious waves around at least my network, and I'm sure your network too- Mm-hmm... 4:04 talking about the challenge of, of climate risk and how government, society doesn't seem to understand the, the dire straits we're in. So I've written about this. I'm sure Ceres has written, spoken to people about this. 4:17 It really did blow up, and I wanna get into the substance and form of that memo shortly. But first, Jacqueline, let's start with you. Can you tell us your background in the insurance world and what led you to join Ceres? 4:30 Sure. So I, you know, I've really spent my career looking at insurance from almost every angle. I started as a P&C insurance examiner for the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance. 4:41 Then I was chief of Property and Casualty Division. And in that role, you know, I saw firsthand how regulators balance solvency, affordability, and availability. 4:50 Then I was Director of Regulatory Affairs for our state rating bureau. We're one of 12 states that have a rating bureau associated with insurance. 4:57 And then I've also worked on the carrier side as a product manager for personal lines in high-risk wildfire states. 5:04 So I've seen, you know, the carrier perspective of building products and thinking about how risk actually gets priced. Yeah. What led me to Ceres was seeing the same pattern from every seat. 5:14 Climate was changing the risk landscape faster than our tools, our regulations, and our business models were adapting, and Ceres really sits at the intersection of investors, insurers, regulators, and stakeholders, and that's exactly where I think the solutions have to come from. 5:29 So today, I lead our insurance program, where we focus on climate risk disclosure, transition planning, home hardening, and resilience. 5:35 And I also serve as a consumer liaison representative for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and that helps keep me grounded in what this means for actual policyholders as well. 5:46 So that's interesting that you have this experience both on the insurance side and also the regulatory side, and now, I suppose, in the nonprofit advocacy space, I'd say. Yeah. 5:55 Can I ask, over the course of your career then, you said you've seen the same pattern, but has climate risk become a more salient issue among regulators and among carriers, or are you seeing- Like regulators maybe not paying as much attention as you thought. 6:09 Some carriers are looking at it, but not as much as others. What's the sort of state of play? 6:13 Well, the reality is that preparation or noticing climate risk as an emerging issue over the last 20 years, you know, it's really been uneven. Some regulators, some insurers, you know, they do take it seriously. 6:26 They've noticed it, and they've been building their capability for-- in that space for years. 6:31 And others are earlier in their journey or, you know, there are climate naysayers out there, you know, that say it's, it's weather not climate, [chuckles] which, which is a very insurance nuanced way to argue that point. 6:44 And it's, it's really closing that gap between, you know, the leaders and the laggards. That's our challenge right now, and that's why these conversations matter. 6:53 So let's talk about the anonymous memo from senior insurance executives that was released the other week. It's called Sounding the Alarm and was convened by a new-ish nonprofit organization called InsideTrack. 7:05 For those unfamiliar, can you explain what the memo said and why you think it blew up the way it did? 7:10 The memo comes from a group of current and former senior people across UK and European insurance, reinsurance, and brokering. 7:17 And it, it really its core argument is that the industry's default response to rising physical climate risk follows a predictable path, right? 7:25 Raising prices, narrowing coverage, and eventually pulling back from the highest risk areas, as honestly that's what the short-term incentives reward, right? That kind of knee-jerk reaction to increasing risk. 7:39 But the result we see is that more losses end up uninsured and land on households, businesses, and taxpayers. 7:45 The memo also connects this to broader financial stability, particularly the link between property insurance and mortgage markets. Now, we agree with the core premise. Climate risk is financial risk. 7:55 These are the issues Ceres and many others have been raising for years. 8:00 So we think what's valuable about this moment is that it adds momentum to a conversation that the industry regulators and investors, they need to be having. And, you know, why did it resonate? I think for a few reasons. 8:13 First, the messenger. When people inside the industry who really price risk for a living say this out loud, it lands differently than when it comes from advocates or academics. Second is the timing. 8:25 People are really living in this right now. Premiums are rising. Non-renewals are rising. And in the US, we've seen carriers withdraw from large geographies. 8:34 So the memo puts words into something that many people are already feeling. And then third, honestly, the framing. Sounding the alarm, the whistleblower, and the an-anonymity, you know, that's a compelling headline. 8:46 So I've been critical of the memo. I have problems with both its form and content. 8:51 And on the content, what struck me is that it doesn't actually say anything that new about the climate risk threat to insurance, at least to those who are partially in the know. 8:59 And the one supposed revelation it does present, that insurance personnel are pressuring catastrophe modelers and actuaries to lowball their climate risk estimates, I read that as a sensationalization of the standard process that takes place with insurance companies, where they're trying to balance commercial and risk considerations. 9:17 Remember, these are for-profit entities. They want to write business. They want to underwrite risks. So I was wondering what you took from the memo that was new and concerning. Yeah. I actually agree with you on that. 9:28 If you've been following climate risk and insurance, most of what's in that memo is not new. Ceres has been making these arguments for years, and so have regulators, some central banks, and even some industry leaders. 9:40 But I'd push back gently on the idea that not new means not important. There's still value there. And what strikes me is the convergence. 9:48 So when advocates, regulators, academics, and now industry insiders are all describing the same dynamics, that's a signal the risk is real, and it is well understood, but maybe not socialized as much. 10:01 The problem was never that we didn't know what's going on. It's that the pace of action hasn't matched what we do know. 10:08 And on the, on the modeling question, you know, I can't speak to what happens inside any particular company. 10:14 But you're right that every insurer balances commercial considerations against risk estimates, and that's a normal part of governance. That's, that's their role as, you know, insurers. 10:26 So to me, the more useful question is about transparency. When those judgment calls are made, are they documented? Are they visible to boards and regulators? 10:35 And are forward-looking climate scenarios part of the conversation at all? And that's where disclosure and scenario analysis matter because they make those trade-offs visible rather than leaving them inside a black box. 10:47 So what concerns me most is that theme of reprice, restrict, and retreat. 10:53 You know, if that's the main tool the industries reaches for, we end up with that growing protection gap, and that's a problem for everyone, including the sector. 11:02 I'm totally with you on the fact that just because something's not new, it isn't important. 11:06 And this comes back to the framing of the memo, which did help to grab people's attention and put the climate threat to insurance and insurability itself as a concept, uh, into the conversation. 11:17 And I couldn't help draw parallels between this memo and some of the anonymous and non-anonymous whistleblowing efforts by folks who work in the AI industry, right? I'm sure that came across your mind as well. 11:30 [chuckles] We've had a number of insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Google raise the alarm about the lack of safety standards in their entities and saying, "Look, we need to slow things down. 11:40 We need to make sure there are safeguards and regulations in place to ensure that the risks of AI are properly taken care of." And I think the same sort of idea was behind this insurance memo. 11:52 But it did make me think, like, okay, who is the audience for this? And as you said, like, it's just, you know, kind of summing up a lot of the concerns around climate risk we've heard over the last few years. 12:01 But I'm wondering, should this really have been aimed at regulators? 12:05 'Cause it does sound like the insurer's like, "Look, we can't change our behavior because of market incentives, because we are competitive private entities. We need to be regulated. We need someone to step in here." 12:15 So who do you see the audience of this memo? Is it the regulators? Is it other carriers? Is it just the general public? Well, I think they issued the memo with the intentions of reaching a wide audience. 12:27 On the regulators' side, I think regulators read it and would've had the same kind of reactions that you and I had. 12:33 Like, we do know this is an issue, and we are doing everything to address it, but we're trying to address it within a traditional insurance framework that was built for an environment that no longer exists, you know, with our increasing frequency and severity of severe weather events. 12:49 I think ultimately it's aimed at the general public to whip up that consumer outrage and put more pressure on the actors and stakeholders involved. It's such a complex issue. 13:03 You know, we, we did a report a couple of years ago called the Reimagining Insurance Series 10-Point Plan for the Insurance Industry. 13:11 And in that we say the 10 insurance things that kind of need to change in order to move the industry forward under our new climate reality, but we're very careful to kind of attribute a responsibility matrix. 13:25 This is not something that just insurers can solve. This is not something that just regulators can solve, or the onus is not just on homeowners to undertake home hardening measures and reduce their risk. 13:38 It'll really take action by everyone involved. It'll take regulatory reforms. It'll take, you know, more incorporation of the NAIC's Climate Risk Disclosure Survey and transition plans for insurers. 13:53 I'd love to highlight that California just announced yesterday that they're enacting their long-term solvency planning regulation, which in effect is a transition plan for climate and cyber risk, and it's the first of its kind in the nation, and we know several other states are very interested in proposing similar legislation. 14:12 So I think it's effective in the sense of bringing more attention to the issue. You know, I've been insurance my whole career, and people think it's very boring, and that's fine. 14:25 Just bringing that attention, making people care before there's a loss, 'cause that's what we usually see. 14:31 People don't pay attention to their insurance until after they have a loss event, and then they realize they were under-insured or flood wasn't included in their policy. So from that effect, I think it was successful. 14:44 I think it would've been more successful if they had laid out some recommendations, next steps more concretely, rather than just dropping the big rock in the pond and watching the ripples. 14:54 So I, I think it, it, it was, it was well-intentioned, and I, I, I can understand, you know, reasonably why they would have kept it anonymous. 15:03 You know, like you said, it, it may have had more impact, and that's what they were going for, but again, without next steps or what to do, we just have outrage and, and nowhere to go with it. Um- Yes. 15:14 I appreciate that, that the general public might have finally woken up to the challenges facing insurance because of this memo, and that is, that has value in and of itself. 15:23 I actually wonder whether regulators, governments have to take the lead here. In the US it's difficult 'cause we have this state-based regulation regime. 15:31 We have some states like California pushing ahead, others, you know, just kind of putting their heads in the sand. In Europe it's a bit different. In the UK, Australia it's a bit different. 15:39 But I do feel like we have capital requirements, right, that say that insurers have to put aside X amount of liquid capital to deal with risks that are beyond their modeling expectations. 15:50 We have scenario analysis requirements. We have all sorts of prudential and conduct rules in place, and it feels like if you tweak... 15:58 if you turn those dials up a little bit, that you'd actually see insurers respond very quickly because they are so capital sensitive. 16:05 So I still think that the onus really is on regulators, and why we have a lot of these conversations trying to browbeat the industry is because we know, at least in the States, that we're not gonna get every state regulator to take the action we need. 16:16 That's my opinion. I'm wondering what you think about it. I think you're right. And, you know, the, the state-based insurance regulation system in America is, it's, it's both a positive and a negative, right? 16:27 [laughs] A positive because, you know, all 50 states, they're so different in economies and geographies and perils they face, you know, so it makes sense from, from that perspective. 16:38 But then again, you have that patchwork of, you know, maybe some commissioners are making it more of a priority than others, or they're passing regulatory reforms to, you know, allow forward-looking climate models in their rate making, or products like parametric insurance, which don't necessarily meet the definition of an insurance product, but we're- Yes... 16:58 you know, trying to fold them under the purview of the insurance regulator. We've had insurance-led initiatives in the past. I mean, the one that comes to mind is the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, right? 17:09 I don't think many, if any, US insurers were part of that, but European and UK insurers were part of that. 17:14 That was very focused on transition risk, admittedly, but it was also a forum for discussions about how the industry as a whole can lower its own climate risk exposure. 17:22 That fell apart because of fears of antitrust and certain attorneys general sending scary letters [laughs] to insurers who got spooked. Yeah. 17:31 So I'm kind of down on industry-led initiatives, and I think regulation is, is the only real way forward, and indeed individual choice, right? I mean, I'm talking here from New York. I'm right by the river. 17:43 There's massive resiliency projects going on right n- nearby, which I'm hoping will keep [laughs] me safe in my apartment here, but there's no guarantee. 17:49 And I'm aware that if we get flooded, I should take some responsibility. I live right by the river. Seas are rising. Hurricane Sandy hit here just over, what, 14 years ago. 17:58 So [laughs] I shouldn't be surprised if that happens, and I shouldn't come crying to my insurer or to the government because of something that I should have been aware of and I am aware of. 18:07 So I do think individual responsibility is a part of this, too, but I think regulation is the lever that we must pull first. 18:13 And, you know, I think it's, it's important to acknowledge that here in the States The, the current political environment, right, makes it difficult sometimes to even engage in dialogues about climate risk as, as a real risk. 18:27 So you mentioned that NCIA, and it... we did have American insurers as part of that initially, um, but like you said, they, they ended up withdrawing under threats of anti-antitrust prosecution. 18:42 So from that perspective, I think you're right. It really will take the regulators, and it'll take a wave of, of regulators working together to, to really push these initiatives forward, and we already are seeing that. 18:55 You know what? At the NAIC, you know, there, there's task force and working groups that are specifically dedicated to these issues. 19:03 You know, we have states like California who have done amazing regulatory reforms over the past few years in the Sustainable Insurance Initiative that Commissioner Lara has done. 19:12 Connecticut, New York has, has done some amazing proactive work, and some Midwestern states as well. So y- I would agree with you. 19:20 It's really gonna start with the regulators, and I, you know, I think the insurers will, will follow. And I don't think it's that the industry doesn't necessarily care. 19:31 I think there's a little bit of hesitancy in being public either way about climate risk because it, it can be such a polarizing word, you know, in today's political climate over here. Yes. It's fascinating. 19:46 I keep coming back to the example of Alabama, actually, a southern state, very Republican, but with one of the most forward-thinking policies when it comes to climate risk mitigation and insurance, I think, anywhere in the States. 20:00 [laughs] They have this fantastic regime in place whereby homeowners are encouraged, incentivized to fortify their roofs against storm damage, and there are insurance discounts that have to be made available to those households that do have that in place. 20:14 So that's active adaptation resilience and appreciation of risk mitigation by the insurers themselves, right? So that's a very forward-thinking effort. 20:23 But I don't think the words climate change [laughs] or even, like, extreme weather are even mentioned. It's just like, you live in Alabama, you know you're gonna get hit by storms, and this just makes sense. Okay. 20:34 I wanna turn to the work you're doing with Ceres now. What trends are you seeing in insurers' disclosures on climate risk and resilience? 20:43 So you've done this survey multiple times now, so I'm interested to know, are we moving towards a more open and frank disclosure of climate risks by major property and casualty carriers or not? 20:53 First, I just wanna start with something the US maybe doesn't get enough credit for. Through the NAIC Climate Risk Disclosure survey, we have insurers in 30 states covering more than 85% of the total US market. 21:05 They're reporting annually against that TCFD, or ISSB abroad, framework which addresses risk management strategy, governance, and metrics and targets. 21:15 So we're very proud that today more US insurers publish TCFD reports than the rest of the world combined, so there's real leadership there. 21:24 But to answer your question, our 2026 progress report, which looked at over 500 insurance groups, so nearly 2,000 individual carriers, we looked at their surveys, and we looked at their reporting over the last four years. 21:38 And what we found was what we call the breadth versus depth paradox. So on breadth, the industry has answered the question of whether to report. We have very high response rates. 21:51 We have more than 83% of insurers providing responses under all four of those pillars. On depth, though, that's not as much of a positive outcome. 22:02 Only about 10 and a half percent of disclosures actually meet the standard for substantive decision useful reporting, and men- more than half of the data points that we assessed weren't found at all. 22:15 They were not mentioned, not discussed. And what's troubling is, you know, we've done this report for four years, and that has kind of been the results year after year. 22:26 We have much higher submissions of the Climate Risk Disclosure survey, but full responses, decision useful responses, you know, we're just not seeing them in pillars like metrics and targets. 22:38 But the trend that concerns me the most is the direction of forward-looking disclosure. Backward-looking metrics are improving. 22:45 Carriers are getting better at reporting catastrophe modeling outputs like probable maximum loss, average annual loss, but forward-looking commitments are going the other way, so that's the trend that we're seeing in this reporting. 22:57 Disclosure of transition plans fell from about 12% of those responses being rated fully met down to 8% over four years, and climate targets fell 10% to 7% in this last round of reporting. 23:12 So what we see is carriers are more comfortable describing what they've already done rather than committing to what they'll do next or disclosing what they'll do next. 23:22 Is that because they don't want to be hostages to fortune? They wanna say, "We are planning to do this," then not do it for some reason and get told off about it? Yeah. Anecdotally, that's the feedback we've heard. 23:32 They aren't sure if they'll be held to the stated targets that they include in a survey, or it veers too heavily into angering the other side of the political spectrum that may not- End up politicizing... Yes. 23:48 That does play a huge role here. 23:49 So just real reluctance to put in writing what they, what their plans for the coming years are and how they're adjusting their business operations to fully encompass, address, and move beyond it, right? 24:03 Because price hikes and market withdrawals are short-term responses that are not sustainable. 24:09 One thing we also saw, troublingly, some carriers that were once strong reporters actually pulled back in the quality of their reporting in this last round. 24:18 But the, you know, the encouraging part, it's, it's not a capability problem. We have six carriers, you know, ranging from global reinsurers to regional specialists. 24:28 They have more than half of their disclosures fully met, so the response rates were good. 24:34 Which when I say it like that, okay, fully met, maybe not so great in the, in the grand scheme of things when we need 80, 90, or higher percent of, of these responses should be fully met. 24:45 But we do see those leaders that are willing to put in writing and, and codify what they're doing, what their transition plan is. So are we moving towards more open and frank disclosure? 24:56 You know, again, we've, we've won the participation argument, and now the real work is moving from describing risk to quantifying it. 25:04 You know, again, the metrics and targets pillar, where they're asked to quantify their scope one, scope two, scope three emissions, and in IAE emissions, that is the absolute weakest pillar of reporting for the industry ac- that's across all lines of business. 25:20 So that's where we need the regulators to help, you know, through model disclosures, using the information in financial examinations. 25:28 We actually went into several state regulator offices l- over the last year and trained their financial examiner staff on how to use these surveys in their financial examination oversight processes. 25:40 And maybe enforcing a mechanism like comply or explain to explain the backsliding or to explain the lack of robust response. 25:50 So disclosure is, is good, and we have over 85% of the marketplace across all lines of business participating in that disclosure. The decision usefulness of the disclosure is, is, is where we're lagging. 26:03 One thought that comes to mind is that might be personnel related. 26:06 I do know that a lot of insurers, banks, asset managers, they did skill up on sustainability climate per- personnel over the last 10 years, and then a lot of them have been cut because it's like, well, we've done a bunch of reports, the political m- music has changed. 26:20 Actually, maybe we've got nothing else to say. 26:22 We've done a lot of work and we're kind of implementing, so we don't need to re- feel the need to report because we're actually just still doing what we said we were gonna do five years ago, and these things take time. 26:30 So I'm wondering if personnel is part of it, as well as the sort of like the greenhushing, the, the potential politicization of all this, making insurers more reticent to put information out there. I'd agree. 26:41 And, you know, ultimately, they're not penalized for not responding to one of the recommendation questions or providing a half answer. 26:51 As long as the survey is submitted as required, you know, nothing adverse happens for a lower quality [laughs] survey submission, and I think that's where the regulators could, could step in a bit as well. 27:04 Of the metrics and targets as well, I think this is an issue across the financial sector and indeed non-financial corporates as well, is that when you're doing forward-looking analysis, there's always going to be huge margins for error, huge ranges of possibility. 27:18 You can use one provider of climate risk data and get one answer. 27:21 You can use another and get a totally different answer, and then there could be a massive range between those two numbers, and who's to say which is right, which is wrong, because we're talking about what's happening in the future. 27:29 Yes, of course, we need scientifically underpinned forward-looking assessments, right? We can take into account physics is physics, right? 27:36 So we, we have that, but the actual distribution of risks, the severity of a given storm or hurricane season could be very high variance. 27:43 So I do think it's kind of hard, A, to do the analysis in the first place, but B, to be confident enough to say, "We're gonna say the risk is X, between X and Y," when actually X and Y could be just, you know, sticking a finger in the wind. 27:55 Yeah, and you've totally identified the inherent uneasiness of the entire sector, you know, with changing how we do insurance. Insurance rates are always based on historical loss data. 28:08 Every state has regulation that requires rates to be actuarially sound, non-excessive, and non-discriminatory. 28:15 And forward-looking models, exactly as you said, it's difficult to establish they meet any of that criteria because models can be different. 28:24 You know, we can't point at something and say, like an actuary could do with, you know, historical loss data, in that forward-looking data, we can't, we can't say if you're right or not, so how do we know that we're pricing correctly? 28:37 And I think California has done a lot of work in this area 'cause they do allow forward-looking models now, but it's standardized models that everyone must use. 28:46 And in exchange for being able to use those models in rate making, the carriers must agree to write policies in high-risk wildfire areas. 28:55 So it's the stumbling block on how to move forward and move forward well, but I think the industry is working on how to address that as, as best they can and still make sure rates are sound, non-excessive, and non-discriminatory. 29:09 The California example is instructive because there's a bit of give and take there, right? Yes, we can allow you to price in the real risk and the forward-looking risk of wildfires, but you've got to do this. 29:17 I think that's a great way to use regulatory power without angering too many, uh, interests within the insurance industry. Very finally, Jacqueline, can you tell us what your focus is with Ceres over the next few months? 29:30 What are the next insurance-focused projects that we can look forward to coming out of the think tank? So we're really focused on issues of resiliency this year. 29:38 You know, you mentioned the Strengthen Alabama Homes program, which has been wildly successful. It's nonpartisan. It's seen great success in blue and red states. 29:48 So we've been doing a lot of work with both the NAIC, the Residential Mitigation Grant Model law that they just issued, and we're working in several states specifically with their legislators on introducing similar programs in their states, and a few in other states that have the program, but may- maybe not the funding mechanism set up. 30:08 So a lot of what we're doing is directly related to helping promulgate those programs, 'cause they have proven wildly successful in both saving premium for consumers and reducing losses for insurers. 30:20 We'll continue to do our work on climate risk disclosure and the Climate Risk Disclosure Survey, and we're also producing an updated report to our 2023 report on the investment portfolios of insurers. 30:33 And this year we'll be able to offer more than just which insurers investing in fossil fuels. It'll also look at the opportunities, which insurers have embraced the opportunities in the green transition. 30:44 We'll be able to have that nuance, so not just the laggards, but the leaders. Wonderful, Jacqueline. 30:50 Well, that's, uh, full in tray, and I'm looking forward to seeing the outcome of your advocacy and also seeing the, the meaty reports that will be coming out from Ceres in the, in the coming months. 31:01 For now, thanks so much for your time and have a great rest of your week. Climate Proofer is a Climate Proof Media production. It is produced and presented by me, Louis Woodall. 31:10 Subscribe to the Climate Proof newsletter by going to climateproof.news/subscribe. And to learn more about the publication, feel free to reach out directly using our LinkedIn page. Goodbye for now.
