California Department of Insurance Launches First-in-the-Nation Green Ribbon Commission on Biodiversity and Insurance Risk
The California Department of Insurance (CDI) announced in Sacramento on October 26 that Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has created the California Green Ribbon Commission on Nature, Biodiversity and Insurance, a first-of-its-kind initiative to study how biodiversity and ecosystem health influence disaster risk, insurance affordability and availability, and long-term market stability. The announcement came as governments, financial institutions, scientists, Indigenous leaders and policymakers gathered in Yerevan, Armenia, for the Seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17).
According to the department, the commission will bring together leaders in insurance, biodiversity science, conservation, Indigenous stewardship, finance, climate adaptation, engineering and public policy to develop practical recommendations for integrating nature into risk management and insurance decision-making. Founding members include representatives from First Nations, the Karuk Tribe, Stanford University's Doerr School of Sustainability, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and the California Department of Insurance. Lara also released the commission's founding vision, "Nature's Balance Sheet: Biodiversity, Risk, and the Future of Insurance."
Lara said healthy ecosystems reduce risk, protect communities, strengthen economic security and influence the future availability and affordability of insurance, and that California intends not only to participate in the global conversation on biodiversity and insurance but to help define it. Dave Kuhn of the World Wildlife Fund said the insurance industry is uniquely positioned to shift markets toward nature-positive investment and risk practices. Don Hankins, a Miwok practitioner, said Indigenous communities carry generations of knowledge about stewarding ecosystems and that he was honored to contribute that perspective.
The department noted that CBD COP17 is the first global review of progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the international roadmap to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. As climate pressures intensify and disaster losses grow, the health of forests, wetlands, watersheds and other natural systems increasingly influences the frequency, severity and cost of disasters. California, the world's fourth-largest economy, faces some of the most significant climate-related risks in the world while also possessing extraordinary ecological diversity.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：加州红杉国家公园的红杉林（资料图）。Michael Schweppe 摄，CC BY-SA 2.0，来源：Wikimedia Commons / Photo: Redwood forest in Redwood National Park, California (file photo). By Michael Schweppe, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
