Ins. Code, § 937

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) Since 2006, the state of California has funded and undertaken four comprehensive climate change assessments designed to assess the impacts and risks from climate change. The most recent, California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, identified that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, the frequency of extreme wildfires will increase.

(b) The Department of Insurance’s review of the multistate Climate Risk Disclosure Survey in 2023 showed that insurance companies commonly identified that the purchase of reinsurance is a primary strategy for addressing increased risks from catastrophic events such as wildfires and the use of catastrophe modeling is a prominent risk assessment tool.

(c) It is in the state’s interest to expand insurance options for consumers in wildfire-distressed areas of California.

(d) It is in the state’s interest to understand the trends in the insurance markets and the reinsurance strategies and models used by insurance companies, not only to expand the writing of insurance policies, but to understand the systemic risk to the solvency of insurance companies that write policies in wildfire-distressed areas.

(e) Regularly updated information will support the ability of the department to further understand the California residential and commercial property insurance market by providing point-in-time information so the department can evaluate reinsurance trends across the market.

(1) The regularly updated information may include, but shall not be limited to, all of the following:

(A) The overview of a reinsurance program.

(B) The catastrophe program in place.

(C) The type of risk covered.

(D) The California-specific information.

(E) Year-over-year changes.

(f) Regularly updated data will allow the department to better analyze market trends and scenarios, which in turn will result in better, more informed communication to California consumers.