Deep cuts to U.S. government funding for climate research and forecasting by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies will impact catastrophe modelling going forward, Daniel Raizman, global head of client engagement, Climate Risk Advisory at Aon, tells attendees at Insurance Bureau of Canada’s recent 2026 IBC InSight Summit.
“I get asked this question all the time,” he says in response to an audience question. And the short answer is, “Yes.”
Since January 2025, insurers have been framing their messaging around impacts of climate data defunding in terms of how brokers and insurers rely on the data, he says. And this narrative addresses the importance of those data sets to banking and industries that drive key economic sectors.
“We’re notably facing a big setback in terms of research [organization] and potential threat of this data [disappearing], but we’re trying to come at it from a business perspective and say, ‘Hey, we personally rely on this data every day. This is how risk is transacted day-to-day across the insurance and reinsurance industry,’” he tells the audience. “We really care about the preservation of this data.”
Raizman adds the data creates significant value in catastrophe risk management, even without application of a climate lens.
“I would say, 90% of the work I do and the questions I get asked are around, ‘What’s my flood risk today? What’s it look like tomorrow?’” he says, adding clients are less likely to ask what 2050 will look like.
“And I think we have a challenge in managing that as well, because…the language of certain climate modeling is often mid-century, end-of-century. But the reality is that most people care about, ‘What does the next five years look like? What do I face today? How did I get yesterday wrong and [how can we] be better tomorrow?’”
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Much of the conference session’s main portion addressed Canada’s protection gap between what’s covered and what could or should be covered by policies. Panellists spoke to risks around wildfires and flooding that have exposed gaps for Canadian insurers and insureds, as well as inflation’s impact on restoration and replacement costs when customers have claims.
That sparked an audience question on the viability of a future public policy role in closing that gap.
There is work underway with the federal government on building a public-private partnership to help address that gap, notes Ravi Mahabir, vice president of climate at Intact Financial Corporation.
He says such public-private partnerships exist in other jurisdictions, including France and the U.K.
“There are many different constructs that have been deployed in terms of those public-private partnerships to address protection gaps. There are lots of lessons. That’s a good thing,” he tells the summit.
“Public policy is important; a blend of public and private partnership in deploying insurance mechanisms to provide affordable insurance to those high-risk areas. And that should really be a time-bound offering, in that those public private partnerships should really facilitate not just an insurance solution but also risk mitigation, such that those partnerships have phased out period over time.”
There also are misunderstandings within the general public around why insurers might need to reduce coverage or pull out of specific areas where risks are too high, adds Raizman.
“We often get in a blame game…when there’s lack of understanding around the risk that they face, and in realizing that these are businesses at the end of the day.”