Quick Key Facts

• Algae aren’t an animal, plant or fungi. They’re considered members of the protist kingdom, a group of tiny, typically single-cell organisms.
• All algae are broken into one of a handful of categories based on color.
• Nutrient pollution, high water temperatures, extreme weather events, slow water currents and low wind speeds can all drive harmful algae blooms to grow out of control.
• Nutrient pollution occurs when too much of certain nutrients, like phosphorus, enters into a waterway.
• Humans can be at risk from harmful algae blooms when swimming in infested waters or when consuming fish, shellfish or water from those sources.
• Human health impacts from harmful algae blooms can range from vomiting, diarrhea or stomach pain to more severe conditions like paralytic shellfish poisoning or liver failure.
• Algae blooms can be ecologically beneficial, but only when the type of algae isn’t one that produces toxins or depletes oxygen in the water.
• Harmful algae blooms have been identified in freshwater in every U.S. state, plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, while every coastal state has identified harmful algae blooms in saltwater or brackish water.
• There’s plenty you can do at home to help reduce nutrient pollution and harmful algae blooms, such as changing your laundry habits, picking up pet waste and volunteering in harmful algae bloom monitoring efforts.

What Are Harmful Algae Blooms?

Algae are one species within the protist kingdom of living beings, which is mostly composed of single-celled, microscopic organisms that may share traits with animals, fungi and/or plants. The biological grouping also includes kelp and molds. There are two main groups of algae — seaweeds, or macroalgaes, and phytoplankton, or microalgaes — in addition to several different categories of algae based on color: green algae, red algae, brown algae and blue-green algae.

Algae are typically found in water, which is why you’ve probably seen a colony of algae accumulate at different bodies of water, like lakes and rivers. They contain chlorophyll — a compound also found in plants — which allows them to turn sunlight into food. A group of algae is called a bloom. But under certain circumstances, an algae bloom can rapidly grow and become an ecological and health hazard. Once a bloom is toxic, it’s known as a harmful algae bloom.

How Are Harmful Algae Blooms Created?

A variety of factors can lead to the creation of a harmful algae bloom. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), nutrient pollution, high water temperatures, extreme weather events, slow water currents and low wind speeds can all lead to algae blooms to grow out of control. However, the agency notes, “how these factors come together to create a ‘bloom’ of algae is not well understood.”

These factors can lead to algae blooms, but not all blooms are harmful. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are three main algaes that can become harmful: cyanobacteria (called blue-green algae), dinoflagellates and diatoms (both of which are known as microalgae or red tide).

“The most frequent and severe blooms typically are caused by cyanobacteria, the only known freshwater algae with the potential for production of toxins potent enough to harm human health,” explains the U.S. Geological Survey on its website.

What Is Nutrient Pollution?

Nutrient pollution occurs when too much of certain nutrients — mainly carbon, nitrogen or phosphorus, according to NOAA — enter into a waterway. Those substances can accumulate as the result of natural processes, but the main causes of nutrient pollution involve human activities, such as animal manure and pet waste; sewage treatment plant discharge and poorly maintained septic tanks; power plants; detergents; fertilizer; cars; and power plants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

While all organisms need nutrients to survive, too much of these substances can cause algaes to grow out of control. And where there’s overly ample algae, there’s going to be problems. Bacteria feeding on dead, decaying algae also limits the amount of dissolved oxygen in a waterway, which can kill fish.

What Is Red Tide?

One type of harmful algae bloom is known as red tide, an event that happens when one of several different phytoplankton proliferate and produce toxins fatal to marine life and harmful to humans. Found worldwide, red tide is not necessarily red but instead can be a “rusty orange to green to bioluminescent” in color, according to National Geographic. In the Gulf of Mexico, the toxic algal culprit beyond red tide is Karenia brevis. This year, red tide was identified in Florida earlier and stronger than ever.

Human and Animal Health Impacts of Algae Blooms

Human health can be harmed by algae blooms when we swim in waters infested with harmful algae blooms [also known as HABs] or eat fish, shellfish or other seafood from those sources. We can also get sick from drinking or cooking with water from those sources, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

“As with many environmental exposures, children and the elderly may be especially sensitive to HAB toxins,” the agency explains. “Populations that rely heavily on seafood are also at risk of long-term health effects from potentially frequent, low-level exposures to HAB toxins.”

Potential health consequences from these activities can range from nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches or stomach pain to paralytic shellfish poisoning, acute liver failure or seizures. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences provides a lengthier list of potential side effects on their website.

The human health side effects are scary enough, but the CDC warns on its website that “animals can get very sick or even die within minutes to days after exposure to harmful algae and cyanobacteria.” To that end, you should “seek veterinary care immediately if your pets or livestock seem sick after going in or near water.”

In 2019, 242 harmful algal blooms were reported to the CDC by 14 different states, with dozens of human illnesses and hundreds of animal illnesses recorded. Humans should call their local poison control center if symptoms occur consistent with harmful algae bloom exposure after engaging in the aforementioned activities.

How Do Algae Blooms Hurt the Economy?

Because of the health impacts of interacting with waterways that have harmful algal blooms, the surrounding areas may also become less attractive to visit, work or live in. If a tourist wants to get in the water, they might logically avoid an area where the chance of not being allowed to swim is high in the summertime. That lack of easy tourism might make it less attractive to buy property or to start a business there, too.

“A preliminary and highly conservative nationwide estimate of the average annual costs of HABs is approximately $50 million,” writes the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on its webpage. Public health accounts for almost $20 million of the overall annual nationwide cost, but impacts on commercial fisheries ($18 million), recreation and tourism ($7 million) and monitoring and management ($2 million) are still notable.

However, the office adds that “the actual dollar amount of these estimates is highly uncertain due to a lack of information about the overall effect of many [harmful algae bloom] events and a difficulty in assigning a dollar cost to those events that we do understand.”

“While many expenses may be difficult to quantify, there is little doubt that the economic effects of specific HAB events can be serious at local and regional levels,” the office continues.

Are Algae Blooms Ever Beneficial?

Most species of algae don’t create toxins or deplete oxygen in waterways. So according to the EPA, algae blooms can be beneficial in that blooms can serve as useful environmental indicators of nutrient shifts, in addition to supporting the marine food chain, since “all other life in the ocean relies on phytoplankton.”

However, it’s still wise to be cautious around a bloom. That’s because, as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences points out on their webpage, you can’t always “tell if a water body has a harmful bloom just by looking at it.”

Where Are Algae Blooms Impacting Ecosystems?

Cyanobacterial algae blooms have been identified in freshwater within every U.S. state, plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the CDC. Harmful algae blooms caused by dinoflagellates or diatoms, more common in saltwater or brackish water, have been identified in all coastal U.S. states.

Already this summer, officials as widespread as New Jersey,  Rhode Island, Michigan, Vermont and California have warned of harmful algal blooms threatening waterways.

Lake Okeechobee, Florida

One particularly strong example of the impact of harmful algae blooms expanding uncontrollably is in Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Satellite imagery from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows that algae covered more than half of Florida’s largest freshwater lake for the better part of June and July 2023. That has led to public health warnings about swimming or recreating on the lake, as tested samples showed the presence of a toxin created by cyanobacteria.

According to Inside Climate News, widespread draining of the Everglades to “make way for farmland and towns ultimately led to runoff from agricultural operations, septic and sewer systems and fertilized urban landscapes.” Those activities create the conditions under which harmful algae blooms thrive. 

With this lake in particular, water management officials rely on strategic water releases to protect a dike when heavy rains lead to too-high lake levels. But those releases send harmful algae bloom-polluted waters — and the associated ecological and health impacts — straight to residents of surrounding communities. This summer, officials are trying to hold back on releasing water until a safer time algae-wise, but The New York Times reports that “by late June the lake’s level was roughly two feet higher than the United States Army Corps of Engineers would like.”

Can We Predict When Harmful Algae Blooms Will Occur?

The short answer? Kind of. There are numerous official, academic and volunteer monitoring and prediction efforts across the country. 

NOAA likens algal bloom prediction at their Harmful Algal Bloom Operational Forecast System in the Gulf of Mexico to hurricane forecasting, in that they can forecast the path of a bloom, how big it will be and whether it could worsen and use that information to alert the public to problematic waterways.

However, some agencies report having a tough time with accurate forecasting of harmful algae blooms. 

“Predicting when these blooms will occur is one of the greatest challenges we face… Currently, we can’t even predict the correct month,” acknowledges the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, which is testing whether light-measuring sensors can help identify certain cyanobacterias.

How Can I Reduce The Impact of Harmful Algae Blooms?

There are several ways to help mitigate the harm caused by overly abundant algae blooms. 

You can avoid certain sources of nutrient pollution, like detergents, soaps and cleaners that contain phosphate. The EPA recommends you “only run your clothes or dish washer when you have a full load” and to “select the proper load size for your washing machine” to reduce the amount of cleaning products and water used.

You might not think that energy efficiency would tie in with reducing algae blooms, but certain types of power plants are a source of nutrient pollution. To that end, reducing the overall amount of electricity needed helps reduce the number of power plants needed, thus reducing emissions that can spur more algae growth.

Another thing the agency suggests you do that everyone will be grateful for: cleaning up after your pets when they defecate outside, as well as guiding them toward grassy areas where their feces won’t run off into a waterway.

The EPA makes additional recommendations around car washing, driving personal vehicles and maintaining septic tanks and other algae bloom mitigation efforts you can do at home on this webpage. They also make suggestions for yard and garden maintenance —  such as only using the amount of fertilizer you actually need and not applying it on windy or rainy days — on this webpage.
The agency also suggests joining volunteer monitoring efforts to help pinpoint sources of nutrient pollution and restore polluted ecosystems.

The post Algae Blooms: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds. This story was co-published with Popular Science.

It was the face that launched a thousand plastic straw bans. 

The video begins with a close up of the turtle’s head, its dark green, pebbled skin out of place against the stark-white boat deck. Robinson’s hands approach, moving the pliers toward the turtle’s nostril. The tool clamps down on the edge of something — A barnacle? A worm? — barely visible within the dark tunnel. The creature squirms and dribbles blood as the pulling begins. A long, thin object begins to emerge, inch by excruciating inch.

It was August 10, 2015, and marine conservation biologist Christine Figgener was collecting data for her Ph.D. a few miles off the coast of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. She and a colleague, Nathan Robinson, were researching olive ridley sea turtles when they noticed a male had something encrusted in its nose. The pair decided to try to extract the object. Robinson flipped open his Swiss army knife’s pliers and Figgener grabbed her phone and began to film. 

“We had no idea what we were frigging looking at,” Figgener said in a newer, annotated version of the video. It wasn’t until one of the researchers cut off a piece of the object that they realized what it was: a four-inch piece of plastic straw.

“We couldn’t believe that such a mundane object that we really use on a daily basis … that we found it in the turtle’s nose,” she said — “that a tiny object caused so much suffering.”

When Figgener uploaded the turtle straw video to her YouTube account eight years ago, it went viral. For a few years, plastic straws were the trendy rallying cry for sustainability. In many ways, the campaign was a success story — one that elevated our awareness of single-use plastics to the point where it resulted in actual policy change. But upon reflection, not all the solutions that spun out of the anti-straw movement actually held water. In recent years, many environmental pundits have focused on the movement’s shortcomings. 

To many environmentalists fighting plastic pollution, anti-straw advocacy now feels passé — out of touch with the broader need to address all forms of single-use plastic. But the movement’s rise and fall still holds lessons for the activists of today.

From soda bottles to yogurt containers, there is a lot of plastic pollution out there. So how did we end up so obsessed with straws?

The anti-plastic straw movement didn’t actually originate with Figgener’s turtle video. Back in 2011, a 9-year-old named Milo Cress found it odd that the restaurants he would go to with his mom in Burlington, Vermont, would automatically serve drinks with a straw, whether or not their customer wanted one. He approached the owner of Leunig’s Bistro and Café in Burlington, and eventually, Leunig’s became one of the first establishments in the country to ask customers whether they wanted a straw or not.

Eventually, Cress and his mom made some calls to straw manufacturers and estimated that 500 million straws are used and discarded by people in the U.S. every day. The environmental advocacy group Eco-Cycle published Cress’s findings, which in the years since have been cited by nearly every major news media outlet that has covered the plastic straw beat, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. (The credibility of that figure has since been questioned, with market research firms determining the figure to be between 170 million and 390 million a day.)

But the turtle video added just the right amount of injury to plastic insult. Figgener’s viral footage helped stir single-use plastic outrage into a frenzy. Celebrities called on their followers to #stopsucking, a social media campaign that aimed to “turn the plastic straw into environment enemy number one.” 

Thousands of restaurants joined the pledge and the idea took off, reaching the rare environmental threshold of actual policy change. In 2018, Seattle became the first big city in the United States to ban plastic straws. It was followed shortly by other major municipalities in California, New Jersey, Florida, and other states. That same year, companies including Starbucks and American Airlines jumped on the anti-straw bandwagon, the former announcing it would launch a new “sippy” lid for its cold beverages starting in 2020, allegedly diverting more than 1 billion straws per year.

But for all its success in getting people riled up about plastic pollution, much of that outrage seemed limited to, well, straws, which only make up a small part of the single-use problem. National Geographic calculated that of the 8 million tons of plastic deposited into the world’s oceans each year, only 0.025 percent is comprised of plastic straws. 

Some anti-plastic advocates began denouncing the straw bans as “slacktivism,” a type of activism characterized by a lack of commitment or effort. They said the bans gave people an overblown sense that they were making a difference in combating the plastics crisis. For example, anti-straw pledges didn’t seem as concerned with other types of plastic waste or the fossil fuels associated with every part of their life cycle. Even the anti-straw Starbucks sippy lids were actually made from polypropylene, a type of plastic that has a 3 percent recycling rate in the U.S. (The company claimed it was still an improvement, as the new lids could potentially be recycled. Plastic straws are too lightweight and thin to make it through the mechanical recycling sorting process.)

The anti-plastic straw movement also started getting pushback from disability advocates, who pointed out that some people need flexible straws to be able to drink liquids. Paper straws get soggy and fall apart more quickly, reusable straws made of metal are not easy to bend, and silicone straws are difficult to clean.

For the average consumer, functionality is often more important than sustainability, said Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology educator and consultant. “Our brains favor habits because they conserve energy. So if we are going against the current — a BYO straw for example — it’s hard for most people to do so unless highly motivated.”

For restaurants that chose to continue to provide disposable straws, there were options beyond paper or plastic. Straws made with natural materials such as sugarcane and wheat are 100 percent biodegradable, but are inflexible and cost more to manufacture. As a result, many businesses looked to straws made from bioplastics — allegedly compostable plastics made from corn, sugarcane, agave, and other nonpetroleum sources. But according to Brandon Leeds, co-founder of SOFi Paper Products, bioplastics require specific disposal and processing methods, many of which aren’t always followed or clearly outlined, in order for them to decompose effectively. 

“Many businesses desire to adopt sustainable practices, and when they encounter these plastic-like alternatives, they may mistakenly believe that they can be environmentally conscious without truly moving away from the plastic aesthetic,” Leeds said. “The absence of stricter governmental regulations allows companies to take advantage of greenwashing tactics, making it difficult to differentiate genuinely sustainable options from those that are not.”

Buying into greenwashing, a term that refers to environmental “solutions” whose appeal is based on appearing environmentally friendly rather than actually being so, “can be an unconscious psychological defense in individuals to shield them from the fear and overwhelming [feeling] of climate change,” Davenport said. “There can be an unexamined story of ‘I’m doing my part’ because it is more soothing than feeling out of control with the harmful and terrifying trajectory we are on with climate change.”

Plastic straw bans are alive and well today, with new proposals still cropping up at the state and city levels. But eliminating plastic straws is no longer the go-to goal of the anti-plastic movement. Part of that is the result of the existing bans’ success: For many consumers, the absence of plastic straws has become normal, even mundane. Now, anti-plastic advocates hope to harness in new ways the outrage they once inspired. 

According to Jackie Nuñez, the Plastic Pollution Coalition’s advocacy and engagement manager and the founder of The Last Plastic Straw, the anti-plastic straw movement helped advance awareness and understanding of other single-use products. California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have all placed some form of ban on plastic bags. The U.S. Interior Department stated that single-use plastic products will be phased out of national parks and around 480 million acres of federal land by 2032. In 2022, the Canadian federal government implemented a single-use plastics ban that included bags, cutlery, food service ware, and stir sticks.

It’s not really the item, it’s the material that’s the problem, Nuñez said. “All plastic is pollution by design.”

Some activists have attempted to call attention to the scourge of single-use plastics by staging ‘plastic attacks,’ in which protesters head to the grocery store and proceed to remove the plastic wrapping from the food in their carts and return the waste to the store.

Since they began in 2018, the strategy has gone global. Plastic attacks have been reported in places including in Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Peru, and the United States. Some of the biggest demonstrations have drawn hundreds of participants.

The anti-plastic straw movement “triggered a lightbulb moment for a lot of people,” Nuñez said. “It ended up becoming a thing I call a gateway issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Did plastic straw bans work? Yes, but not in the way you’d think. on Aug 4, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

People buy insurance to protect against unlikely but devastating events, big catastrophes that drive households and businesses to financial ruin and bankruptcy. That makes insurance most people’s first line of defense against climate disasters, which now destroy tens of billions of dollars of property in the United States every year. It makes good sense to pay a couple hundred dollars a month in premiums so you don’t go broke if a flood, hurricane, or wildfire destroys your house. 

Heat has long been the exception to this rule among climate disasters. Because heat waves don’t tend to destroy homes and businesses, it’s not practical for most people to buy insurance against high temperatures, and thus there’s never been such a thing as widespread commercial “heat insurance.” Big farming operations may take out insurance to protect against a hot spring that kills crops, and retail companies may buy a policy to hedge against a decline in foot traffic on scorching days, but ordinary people historically don’t want or need financial protection against heat.

Over the past few years, as scorching heat waves have become more common with worsening climate change, that has begun to change. A new suite of unconventional heat insurance products has emerged in a range of countries around the world: Japanese insurers began to sell single-day heatstroke insurance; a charitable foundation launched a program to insure Indian workers against lost wages; and an experimental new policy emerged to protect British farmers against heat stress in cattle.

Some of these new products have drawn lots of media attention in the United States, but experts believe it’s unlikely that heat insurance will ever become a big commercial industry like fire and hurricane insurance are today. Instead, they say, heat insurance makes more sense as a financial tool to help protect people in developing countries against climate change — but only if it’s coupled with government policies that reduce the risks of heat for good.

The heat insurance trend broke into the mainstream last year when two major Japanese insurance companies rolled out novel heatstroke insurance products. The Asian country was enduring a sweltering summer, and the companies were aiming to capitalize on concern about heat exposure by offering short-term health insurance plans that exclusively covered heatstroke. The plans led to a flurry of media coverage in financial publications like Bloomberg, Fortune, and the Financial Times.

Even in a national insurance market known for innovation, the Sumitomo Life heatstroke program stands out as unusual. Using a mobile app, a customer pays the equivalent of about 70 cents for a one-day insurance policy that kicks in at 10 a.m. If the buyer suffers heatstroke over the course of the day and ends up in the hospital, the policy covers the costs of an intravenous drip and most other medical treatment. (Japan has a universal health care system funded by tax revenue and premiums, but patients still pay a copay for most health services and treatments.) A customer can also pay about $1.57 for a plan that lasts an entire month. The program offered by the other company, Sompo, works more or less the same way. 

More than 80,000 people have enrolled in Sumimoto Life’s program since it launched last summer, said Junichiro Kaneda, a spokesperson for the insurance company. During the hottest stretch of last summer, several thousand people purchased the coverage per day. 

“Due to the abnormal weather conditions in the summer, the risk of heatstroke has been reported daily in the media, leading to an increase in people’s potential anxiety,” said Kaneda in response to questions from Grist. “Therefore, it is expected that the market will expand.”

Another heat insurance program in the north of India drew a similar rush of media attention this spring. The program, led by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, provides “heat income micro-insurance” to thousands of women who work outdoors in the state of Gujarat, aiming to protect them from losing wages on the days when it’s too hot to work. 

Arsht-Rockefeller, which has also endowed “chief heat officer” positions in cities around the world, partnered with the insurance startup Blue Marble to enroll 21,000 women in the program. The women are members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a trade union that represents more than 2.5 million female day laborers in northern India who work in a wide variety of jobs, from salt harvesting to street-food vending. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India in February to see how salt harvesters were dealing with high temperatures and later announced that she would serve as Arsht-Rock’s “global ambassador for heat, health, and gender.”

In contrast to the traditional insurance model, where a customer receives a payout only after filing a claim for a specific amount of damage, the program uses what’s known as a “parametric” system, meaning it pays out when measurable conditions meet certain parameters. The women pay a $3 enrollment fee, equivalent to about a day’s wages, and if local temperatures average above 90 degrees for three straight days, they receive a digital cash transfer worth a few days’ wages, allowing them to stay home from work. (The enrollment fee doesn’t reflect the full cost of the premiums, which Arsht-Rock and an anonymous donor paid for.) The foundation also distributed gloves to protect workers from hot surfaces and electrolyte tablets to help them stay hydrated.

“The solution for heat right now, while the workers have blisters on their hands, is something immediate,” said Kathy Baughman-McLeod, the director of Arsht-Rock. “The main thing to worry about is, of course, their income, because they have to feed their kids even if they can’t work, right?”

The program went through a two-month test run earlier this year, but even though India suffered through an extended heat wave for most of the spring, the temperature never got high enough to trigger a payout. But the foundation plans to expand the program to millions more women in India over the next few years, and also plans to add an early warning system that alerts workers about heat via WhatsApp.

array(1) {
  [0]=>
  int(613298)
}

Read Next

How climate change drives hotter, more frequent heat waves

Joseph Winters

For the moment, though, all these programs are still niche initiatives. The Arsht-Rock adaptation initiative and the Sumitomo insurance plan reached just a few tens of thousands of people each, and other heat insurance products are even smaller. A parametric insurance program for heat-stressed cattle that launched in the United Kingdom this year is still in a trial phase. That program distributes immediate payments to dairy farmers during heat waves, accounting for the fact that cows can get sick or even die during hot spells.

Heat insurance is unlikely to become a big commercial market in the Global North anytime soon, says Jisung Park, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies climate risk and finance. The Sumitomo heatstroke program might sell well in Japan, a very elderly country where many people are anxious about heat, but Park says most people in the U.S. and other developed countries likely wouldn’t feel the need to get extra coverage.

“In terms of salience, [heat] is certainly not up there as a big perceived risk,” he told Grist. For most Americans, he said, “the idea of expanding your health insurance coverage for a risk that you’re going to incur by going outside is really kind of unusual. It’s sort of like the salesman at the rental car agency trying to scare you into buying additional coverage even though you already have coverage.”

By the same token, the income insurance that Arsht-Rock designed for Indian workers likely wouldn’t appeal to workers in developed countries who have robust workplace protections, paid sick leave, or unemployment benefits. Rather, it’s meant to protect vulnerable self-employed populations who don’t have a safety net. Even though this kind of heat income micro-insurance might appeal to workers in the U.S. who don’t have a centralized employer and who face extreme risk working outdoors on hot days — like day laborers, delivery workers, and agricultural workers — Arsht Rock is focusing for the moment on expanding it in the Global South.

Instead of spurring new types of insurance products, heat waves are more likely to place more stress on existing insurance markets in the United States and other developed countries. Most U.S. states require employers to carry worker’s compensation insurance that cover on-the-job injuries, including those related to heat. Park’s own research shows that heat waves make on-the-job injuries much more likely, which could one day place a new strain on the worker’s comp system and drive up premiums. 

In the developing world, though, parametric insurance will be an essential part of adapting to climate change, said Ekhosuehi Iyahen, the secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum, a partnership between the World Bank and major insurers that aims to design new climate insurance for developing countries.

“In the developing world context, we’re dealing with markets where insurance is not readily available, accessible, affordable,” Iyahen told Grist. “There’s a huge protection gap that exists there, and that’s very different from most developed markets where insurance in most instances is built out.”

Even so, said Iyahen, the best solution might not be heat insurance as such. For outdoor workers like the women in Gujarat, the temperature outside is the most important factor in whether it’s safe to work, but heat can also cause droughts, wildfires, or crop failures. Adapting to climate change requires cushioning people in developing countries from the losses that follow big disasters, and parametric insurance can help do that. The programs allow people to insure themselves against all kinds of calamities, not just the ones that destroy property, and it also makes payouts faster and easier, removing the need to file and authenticate claims. 

array(1) {
  [0]=>
  int(614689)
}

Read Next

July has been the hottest month in humanity’s history

Lyric Aquino

“I often am a little bit reserved when you talk about heat insurance,” said Iyahen. “Heat is really a much more complex hazard than it’s sometimes perceived, because heat can manifest itself in different ways. You can have heat that’s linked to drought, absence of water, which can have an impact on agriculture. It can have an impact on your ability to generate electricity, or your health.” 

Indeed, Baughman-McLeod of Arsht-Rock says that the insurance initiative only makes sense as part of a broader climate adaptation program. An insurance plan that protects workers against lost wages on hot days only makes sense alongside initiatives that make homes and workplaces more resilient to heat over the long term, whether by developing stronger labor protections or improving residential access to air conditioning. 

“The program is going to be successful because it also has physical equipment and the early warning system,” she said. “Insurance alone is not going to do this.” 

When the 60-day trial in northern India ended without a heat wave that triggered payment, Arsht-Rock asked the Self-Employed Women’s Association about reimbursing the participating women for the fees they’d paid to participate. Baughman-McLeod said the women declined the reimbursement, saying the protective gear was more than worth the money they paid to enroll. They never got a payout, but they were still safer than they would have been.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat is here. Can insurance help protect us? on Aug 4, 2023.