On November 5, 2025, Economic Architecture and Brookings Metro hosted the latest conversation in the Safe, Healthy, and Resilient Homes series, “Rising Risks, Resilient Homes: Reimagining Insurance for Communities.” The discussion explores how how strategic investments in structural innovations, for example, in construction standards and data-driven risk management, can fund further climate resilience efforts. Drawing on lessons from communities that have faced extreme weather, the panelists combine insights from practical solutions at the local level with broader considerations, offering a roadmap for building homes and communities that are safer, healthier, and more resilient.
The event featured:
- Carolyn Kousky, Founder, Insurance for Good; Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy, Environmental Defense Fund
- Charlie Sidoti, Executive Director, InnSure
- Nancy Watkins, Principal, Milliman Inc.
- Manann Donoghoe, Fellow, Brookings Metro
- Andre Perry, Senior Fellow, Brookings Metro; Director, Center for Community Uplift, The Brookings Institution
- Stuart Yasgur, Founder and Principal, Economic Architecture
Insurance is an invitation to a conversation
Opening the discussion, Brookings Senior Fellow Andre Perry set the stage with data showing the scale of the crisis: homeowners’ insurance premiums have risen more than 20% in two years, with non-renewals surging and nearly one in 13 homeowners now uninsured. He warned, “These trends aren’t just about rising costs. They also illuminate the fundamental limits of our current insurance structures.”
Economic Architecture’s Stuart Yasgur added that the challenge extends beyond coverage. “If we want to lower our insurance costs and make sure the coverage is more comprehensive, then we need to lower our risk,” he said, framing insurance as an entry point to a deeper conversation about how communities manage climate exposure through design, policy, and innovation.
Watch the full video of the event:
Reimagining risks and resilience
The discussion explored the structural flaws in current insurance models and the opportunity to rebuild shared risk reduction.
Brookings’ Manann Donoghoe views insurance as a solution, not a problem to be solved. “Insurance isn’t the villain in this story,” he noted. “It’s how we manage and respond to risk that determines whether communities thrive or struggle.”
Nancy Watkins promotes the benefits of data sharing and points out how outdated regulatory frameworks and limited data sharing increase risks. “When risks started to change, all of those things ran into a very inflexible regulatory structure,” she explained. “That made the problem much worse than the risk alone.”
Carolyn Kousky describes how insurance functions on a spectrum. “We hit economic limits before we reach technical limits,” she said. “Insurance becomes more expensive than people can pay, and that drives protection gaps that widen inequality.”
Charlie Sidoti calls for systemic innovation to reconnect resilience with financing. “We need to move from simply pricing risk to reducing it,” he stated. “That requires a new engagement model that ties insurer ability planning into local economic development.”
Innovations reshaping the future of insurance
The experts presented practical ways, based on their experiences, to rethink how communities finance and manage risk.
- Sidoti shared InnSure’s efforts on community development reinsurance institutions, modeled after CDFIs, that blend global capital with local insight to support resilience.
- Watkins discussed the WUI (wildland-urban interface) Data Commons, an open platform connecting parcel-level inspection data to insurers, enabling communities to receive credit for mitigation efforts.
- Kousky highlighted parametric microinsurance pilots through Insurance for Good, offering flexible and rapid payouts to households excluded from traditional models.
The common sentiment among the panelists was that innovation must go hand in hand with public coordination. “This isn’t an engineering problem—it’s a coordination problem,” Yasgur said. “The biggest opportunity is to increase the number of homes and communities using proven resilience techniques.”
Bridging policy, markets, and human behavior
When mapping obstacles to progress, Watkins described the challenge of aligning competing stakeholders. “It’s like building an ark and convincing all the animals to get on it, [even] when some of them eat each other,” she said.
Sidoti experienced that even among willing collaborators, technical disciplines often “speak different languages.” Actuaries, engineers, and policymakers must learn to translate across fields to accelerate progress.
Kousky added a point on the issue of affordability. “Low- and moderate-income households simply don’t have the extra dollars for insurance,” she said. “We need both innovation and political will to make safe homes truly affordable.”
How can we move forward?
Watkins urged regulators and states to update their planning frameworks to focus on measuring outcomes rather than just activities.
Kousky noted that while loans, grants, and insurance models need to change, “the answer to unprofitable regions is to invest in reducing the risk itself.”
As Andre Perry concluded, he emphasized a call to collaborate. “The greatest risk we face is not working together. Across sectors and communities, we have to act together.”
Economic Architecture and Brookings will continue this work through upcoming events and a podcast series highlighting innovators across the country. Together, these conversations are highlighting innovations with the potential to help communities withstand the impacts of escalating climate disasters.