An article titled “Are You Sure Your House Is Worth That Much?” recently featured in The Atlantic, discusses how homeowners insurance is rising due to the risks posed by climate change. However, outside the insurance sector, home prices are overvalued and do not accurately reflect climate risk. The article references a MACH-supported paper titled “Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in U.S. housing markets,” which concludes that U.S. residential properties are overvalued by $121 billion to $237 billion for current flood risks alone. The authors of the paper include three members of MACH: Jesse Gourevitch, a postdoctoral fellow on the Economics Team at the Environmental Defense Fund; Carolyn Kousky, Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy at Environmental Defense Fund and Co-PI on MACH; and Adam Pollack, Research Scientist in the Keller Lab Group in the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.
Read the full article here in The Atlantic.