(English version)
The climate crisis no longer has any fluid forecasts: writing a new page that puts an end to any interpretation of numbers and scenarios are the large insurance companies in the USA who, in no uncertain terms, have decided to no longer underwrite policies on homes in areas heavily exposed to climate disasters. State Farm, one of the most important American insurance companies, has recently applied the new protocol in California after having done the maths on how much the volume of indemnities has cost so far, decreeing that the area is to be considered a ‘high climate risk’ area. Even Allstate, as the Guardian writes, is cancelling property policies in Florida and Louisiana because of fires and floods.
To make matters worse, there is also the increasingly extreme alternation between dry and rainy phases that generate terrible hurricanes. The financial forecasts of what this could cost insurance companies raise the alarm about future company budgets. If there is no longer an insurance shield, many will find themselves unable to rebuild their homes or reactivate their businesses. There will inevitably be new inequalities even in those hitherto protected areas.
Climate change-related exclusion has long been the concern of Amnesty International, which points its finger at the effects of environmental catastrophes on the rights to life, health, food, water and housing.
As stated on Amnesty’s Italian website, more and more people are victims of cross-discrimination.
Academics in particular have alerted the international community to the issue on several occasions, arguing how environmental degradation can exacerbate social inequalities.
It is increasingly an alarm for humanity and there is an urgent need to address the problems in a complex way. The world’s leading scientific body for assessing climate change – IPCC — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – warns that global greenhouse gas emissions ‘will peak by 2025 at the latest and must be reduced by 43% by 2030’. Immediate large-scale action is needed to stop this, Amnesty writes, but urgency must not be an excuse to violate human rights.
