Environmental Risk Assessment & Insurance

Catalog description

Natural weather events, such as the wind blowing, can cause financial and other risks to unwary commercial wind project developers. Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, and other climate change-induced occurrences, can leave ordinary companies at risk and vulnerable to serious economic losses. In the future, these weather and climate patterns may play a significant role in shaping future policy, from offshore wind farm development to water rights allocation. Awareness of scientific data, applicable laws, and policies, coupled with risk avoidance and risk mitigation techniques – including the use of insurance –can enhance a person’s or business’s ability to make well-informed decisions, implement a prudent risk management strategy, decrease climate change-induced and other weather-related vulnerabilities, and increase resilience to weather-related risks. This course will examine such matters as risk avoidance and/or insurance issues, as well as legal and policy matters, with respect to the following: (1) strategies for addressing wind wakes; (2) the role of insurance in the future of U.S. offshore wind farm development; (3) how far the zone of impact may reach in pollution liability-related claims under a greenhouse gas/climate change causation theory; (4) flooding, storm damage, and other water-related impacts that can harm businesses in both expected and unanticipated ways, and (5) types of insurance policies a company may want to have in place to protect against certain of these occurrences.