Catastrophe insurance provides peace of mind and financial security. Climate change can have adverse impacts on insurance affordability and availability, potentially slowing the growth of the industry and shifting more of the burden to governments and individuals. Most forms of insurance are vulnerable, including property, liability, health, and life. It is incumbent on insurers, their regulators, and the policy community to develop a better grasp of the physical and business risks. Insurers are well positioned to participate in public-private initiatives to monitor loss trends, improve catastrophe modeling, address the causes of climate change, and prepare for and adapt to the impacts.

Commissioning is arguably the single most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions in buildings today. Although commissioning has earned increased recognition in recent years, it remains an enigmatic practice whose visibility severely lags its potential. The application of commissioning to new buildings ensures that they deliver or exceed the performance and energy savings promised by their design and intended operation. When applied to existing buildings, commissioning identifies deficiencies and the almost inevitable “drift” from intended performance over time, and carries out interventions to put the building back on course. More formally, commissioning is a systematic, forensic approach to quality assurance and performance risk management, rather than a technology per se. This article presents the world’s largest compilation and meta-analysis of commissioning experience and the associated literature, comprising 643 non-residential buildings, 99 million ft² of floorspace, $43 million in commissioning expenditures, and the work of 37 commissioning providers. The median normalized cost to deliver commissioning is $0.30/ft² ($2009 currencies) for existing buildings and $1.16/ft² for new construction (or 0.4% of the overall construction cost). The one third of projects for which data are available reveal over 10,000 energy-related deficiencies, the correction of which resulted in 16% median whole-building energy savings in existing buildings and 13% in new construction, with payback times of 1.1 and 4.2 years, respectively. Because energy savings exceed commissioning costs, the associated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions come at a “negative” cost of −$110/tonne CO₂ for new buildings and −$25/tonne for new construction. Cases with comprehensive commissioning attained nearly twice the overall median level of savings and five times the savings of the least-thorough projects. Significant non-energy benefits such as improved indoor air quality are also achieved. Applying the median whole-building energy-saving values to the US non-residential buildings stock corresponds to an annual energy-saving potential of $30 billion (and 340 Mt of CO₂) by the year 2030.

Contemporary questions about sustainable energy and development converge in unexpected ways around a technology that is at once an echo of the past and yet very much a part of the present: fuel-based lighting in the developing world. An emerging opportunity for reducing the global costs and greenhouse gas emissions associated with this highly inefficient form of lighting energy use is to replace fuel-based lamps with white solid-state ("LED") lighting, described in this [Policy Forum][1], which can be affordably solar-powered. Doing so would allow those without access to electricity in the developing world to affordably leapfrog over the prevailing incandescent and fluorescent lighting technologies in use today throughout the electrified world. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5726/1263

Examining the intersection of risk analysis and sustainable energy strategies reveals numerous examples of energy-efficient and renewable energy technologies that offer insurance loss-prevention benefits. The growing threat of climate change provides an added motivation for the risk community to understand better this area of opportunity. While analyses of climate change mitigation typically focus on the emissions-reduction characteristics of sustainable energy technologies, less often recognised are a host of synergistic ways in which these technologies also offer adaptation benefits, e.g. making buildings more resilient to natural disasters. While there is already some relevant activity, there remain various barriers to expanding these efforts significantly. Achieving successful integration of sustainable energy considerations with risk-management objectives requires a more proactive orientation, and coordination among diverse actors and industry groups. Lorsque l'on examine les relations entre les stratégies d'analyse du risque et d'énergie durable, on constate qu'il existe de nombreux exemples de technologies concernant le rendement énergétique et les énergies renouvelables qui offrent des avantages en matière d'assurance contre la prévention des sinistres. La menace croissante des changements climatiques est une nouvelle incitation pour les spécialistes du risque à mieux appréhender ce domaine. Alors que les analyses portant sur l'atténuation des risques entraînés par les changements climatiques se concentrent, pour l'essentiel, sur les possibilités de réduction des émissions qu'offrent les technologies relatives aux énergies durables, il existe de nombreuses synergies entre ces technologies, moins souvent reconnues, d'où se dégagent des avantages en termes d'adaptation; c'est le cas, par exemple, de la construction de bâtiments qui résistent mieux aux catastrophes naturelles. Bien qu'il existe déjà quelques activités dans ce domaine, il reste encore divers obstacles à franchir avant de parvenir à une expansion significative de ces efforts. L'intégration réussie des avantages apportés par l'énergie durable aux objectifs de gestion du risque exige une orientation qui soit plus proactive et une meilleure coordination entre les divers groupes d'acteurs et d'industriels.