Talk: Using Insurance to Facilitate Adaptation to and Mitigation of Climate-related Risk

Using Insurance to Facilitate Adaptation to and Mitigation of Climate-related Risk

Lindene Patton
Chief Climate Product Officer
Zurich Financial Services
Bren School Advisory Board Member

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 @ 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
Bren Hall 1414

*This talk can be viewed on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UFkXgmfiOo


Abstract
While Insurance is designed to facilitate protection of assets, it is also a dynamic tool that can also be leveraged to manage a public good, such as climate. Learn how government regulation and public-policy actions can distort the marketplace in ways that inadvertently encourage risky behavior and exacerbate free-rider challenges. Ms. Patton will also discuss why public-policy makers are often conflicted about risk-based price signals in the context of climate change, especially with respect to existing community assets. She will also address the issue of pooling and how some see it as a way to avoid difficult discussions about who should pay for certain risks and costs associated with low-carbon conversion. And she will discuss how government subsidies can actually introduce risk into technology—and how risk-based price signals (premiums) associated with insurance serve to reduce the risk of deploying new technology.

Biography
Lindene Patton serves as Chief Climate Product Officer at Zurich Financial Services. She manages the Underwriting Counsel staff and the Cost Engineering Services staff, which provide support to the environmental underwriting division and the architects and engineering underwriting division. She also oversees the group that underwrites guaranteed fixed-price remediation stop loss and all environmental impairment liability programs.

Ms. Patton has substantial expertise in all aspects of environmental insurance and professional liability insurance for the design professional, and she supports the development and improvement of all lines of environmental insurance. Additionally, she has worked extensively in standard property and casualty insurance and other specialty insurance coverages, such as political risk. She evaluates issues related to climate change and has developed products to support carbon trading and other unique solutions designed to assist customers in their adaptation to climate change.

Ms. Patton is an attorney licensed in the State of California and the District of Columbia, and an American Board of Industrial Hygiene Certified Industrial Hygienist. She holds a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Davis. She received her master's in public health from the University of California at Berkeley, and her J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law.