极端气候与保险市场的严峻现实
近年来，加拿大遭遇了多次极端天气事件，包括灾难性的野火和毁灭性的洪涝，这些灾害导致了生命损失和广泛的财产损失，造成了高昂的经济代价。根据加拿大保险局（Insurance Bureau of Canada）的数据，仅去年一年的损失就超过了 24 亿加元。随着气候变化使极端天气事件愈发频繁和强烈，人们不禁担心，加拿大是否会面临所谓的“不可保危机”。美国部分地区因气候风险过高已出现“保险沙漠”现象，而加拿大虽然目前保险仍然广泛可用，但价格上涨和承保范围侵蚀的迹象已经显现。
Original English Source
Canada has been hit by multiple extreme weather events these past few years. We have seen catastrophic wildfires, devastating flooding and more. They have caused loss of life and widespread property damage, which comes with a pretty hefty price tag. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, those losses added up to more than $2.4 billion last year. As climate change makes those events more common and more intense. Is there a chance that whole areas of Canada could just become uninsurable? We look at whether we're headed for an insurability crisis and what we could do to stop it. Then we talked to scientists and author Suzanne Simard about the rising risk of wildfires and how we could transform our forests from carbon sources to carbon sinks. This is The Rundown. Thanks to the rising number of extreme weather events, some areas in the US have become virtually uninsurable as climate change heightens the risk of fires, droughts and floods here in Canada. Are we headed in the same direction?加拿大保险市场的缓慢“沸腾”
气候风险公司 McGuinty 的 CEO Craig Stewart 指出，虽然加拿大与美国在气候政策上面临类似的“气候疲劳”，但两国的保险体系差异巨大。美国的财产保险受到价格监管，当损失过大时，保险公司往往选择直接退出高风险市场。相比之下，加拿大的财产保险定价并未受到严格监管，保险公司可以根据风险调整保费，因此保险虽然变贵了，但依然广泛可用。然而，这导致了一种“温水煮青蛙”的效应：不仅保费上涨，承保范围也在逐渐缩减，例如在卡尔加里，冰雹保险已成为核心承保范围之外的额外负担，保险公司还开始对老旧屋顶进行折旧赔付，减少了消费者的保障力度。
Original English Source
Craig Stewart is co-founder and CEO of the climate risk company McGuinty, and he joins us from Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. Federal government has stepped quite a bit back, cancelled a number of climate commitments from the previous government, and and is focussed more on on growth and making sure that, you know, Canada is is stable as we're as we're facing, you know, shortages of oil and gas, you know, around the world, there's a there's a demand for our resources. And I guess that's now the attention rather than, than climate change. What has happened in the US is that, you know, insurance companies just simply can't make money. There's price regulation in the United States. So there's a limit to what they can charge for property insurance. And and as a result, when companies are facing huge losses, as we've seen in California from wildfire or Louisiana and Florida from hurricanes and flooding, companies have just backed out. In Canada, very different situation. Property insurance is not regulated, unlike auto insurance in this country. Therefore, pricing isn't regulated and insurers can pay can basically charge whatever premiums they need to to ensure that they make a profit. And that is why, you know, even though we've had, you know, incredible losses, you know, insured losses across this country over the past decade, insurance is still widely available, albeit more expensive in Canada. What we're seeing now is not only are prices going up, but you're getting less for your you're getting less for what you pay for. So there's an erosion insurance coverage as insurers try to adjust to regional risks across the country. Hail is the greatest example. So we've you know, insurers have paid out over $6 billion in hail claims over the past five years, 3 billion in the summer of 2024 alone from one storm. And as a result, a number of insurers just lost their risk appetite for insuring hail in in Calgary, some stopped and others decide to move it out of the core coverage and say, well, you're going to have to pay for hail separately, we've seen deductibles go up in for for perils in high risk areas. So you're, you're paying more and your, your deductible is higher. You're also what we're seeing is roofs being prorated.森林管理策略：从生产驱动到“杀手森林”
森林生态学家 Suzanne Simard 在其著作《When the Forest Breathes》中批评了当前的森林管理实践。她认为，加拿大在过去几十年中，由于森林工业的“公司化”倾向，将森林视为纯粹的木材工厂，过于依赖单一物种（如针叶树）的种植，并喷洒除草剂清除阔叶树。这种单一栽培模式创造了高度易燃的“紧凑型 plantation”，使森林变得像火柴棍一样危险。她将这种受高度干预、且因缺失物种多样性而加剧火灾易燃性的林区称为“杀手森林”（killer forest），指出这种管理不仅降低了森林的韧性，还破坏了水文循环和下层植被，极大地提升了野火发生的风险。
Original English Source
In her new book, When the Forest Breathes Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, Suzanne Simard looks at the effects humans have had on our natural spaces and what it would take to support and protect them. It's changed immensely. It became more about people distant from the forest, you know, shareholders who expected dividends, and if they didn't get their dividends, then they would leave. And so it just changed from us doing it to something else, doing it. And, and we see the consequences now on our landscapes. We've seen extensive clearcutting. We've seen forests that are not nearly as productive as and healthy as the old forests that they that they've replaced. We've seen more wildfire, actually. There's a term I learned from this book. You quoted a, I think a member of the EU from Portugal. So Portugal had a brutal wildfire in 2017. It killed 66 people. And the quote from him is, we have to recognize we've created a killer forest. The reason it's a killer forest is because for one, it requires a lot of water in order to grow these trees. And so it sucks the water. It draws down the hydrologic system, dries out the ecosystem. And then the, the, the tree itself is full of oils that are very flammable and it sheds bark. So we've been focussed on conifers. Why? It's because when, you know, when we started logging the old growth forests, it was the conifers that brought such great market value across the world. And and so we thought, oh, so the foresters thought, well, we'll just replace those conifers with more conifers without the understanding or appreciation that a forest has, goes through a successional period where there's all kinds of species, right? There's deciduous trees, there's understory plants, and, and they grow together in a community. So we just, they focus so much on these coniferous trees and then spraying herbicides and weeding out these other plants that really increase the flammability of the forest.母树计划与生态韧性的修复
为应对这一危机，Simard 发起了“母树计划”（Mother Tree Project），这是一个跨越 1000 公里的气候梯度实验，旨在探索比现行皆伐（clearcutting）更合理的森林经营方式。实验核心在于保留老龄树木（母树）的留存密度与结构，以保护碳库、生物多样性和增强森林的再生能力。在哈达瓜伊（Haida Gwaii）等地，皆伐导致原始雪松林被单一的云杉和松树替代，由于缺乏复杂的地下连接网络（即Simard所言的“地下网络”），这些新种植的林区表现出极低的生态稳定性。通过保留古树，可以维持森林的生态网络，帮助森林适应气候变化和霜冻压力。
Original English Source
So it's a really large experiment and it's a really long lived experiment. It started in 2015. So now it's ten years older, just over ten years. It's a climate gradient experiment. It's 1000km long. It runs from near the border with with the US in dry, hot, arid Douglas fir forests. And it's includes nine research forests all the way up to just north of Prince George in Fort Saint James, where it's cold and snowy, Douglas fir. At each of these nine locations, we're harvesting trees in different ways to figure out a better way to do forestry than clearcutting, which is what we do by and large in Canada. So we're trying different ways of leaving mother trees behind in different densities and configurations to protect, hopefully to protect the carbon pools and the biodiversity of the forests, and to increase the regenerative capacity of the forest. In terms of the one of the big takeaways of this is that to keep those old trees. Yes, it is the you know that we need to leave these old trees behind. You know, we can still log some, but it needs to be selective logging. In one coastal area in B.C. I'm going to try to pronounce it Haida Gwaii. They were cutting down cedars and replacing them with spruce and pine. Because the pine, for one don't belong in those ecosystems. They don't connect into those networks. And so it's changing the forest and the pine trees never connect because they're, you know, they'll never be able to connect to the underground network that those old trees had.从碳源重返碳汇的路线图
Simard 指出，由于气候压力和皆伐造成的森林地板（forest floor）干扰，加拿大森林已于 2001 年整体上从碳汇转变为碳源。皆伐作业过程中，重型机械拖拽树木不仅损毁了地面碳库，还使得大量残留的林地物质被焚烧排放。Simard 建议通过减轻燃料负荷、重新引入原住民的传统烧荒（indigenous burning）以及促进生物多样性来降低火灾风险，从而重塑森林的韧性。她强调，解决气候变化——特别是彻底脱离化石燃料——是修复森林生态系统的根本前提，只有在解决温室气体排放的基础上，辅助精细化的森林经营管理，才能实现将加拿大森林从碳源重新变为碳汇的目标。
Original English Source
So in 2001, Canada's forests shifted from being a carbon sink overall to a carbon source. And that's not a good thing. You know, we're counting on forests to be a carbon sink to help us mitigate our CO2 emissions from fossil fuel production and burning fossil fuels. And why have they become a source? It's it's because the forests are stressed. We're also disturbing them at a high rate through the clearcut logging and development of oil and gas itself, urbanisation, agriculture, and so on. And also with this clearcut logging, if you think about it, when you clearcut a forest, you're losing all that above ground carbon pool, the trees and the plants and the herbs and the mosses and lichens are gone. Our experiments show that we're losing 61% of the forest floor carbon due to these practices. Can we get back to being a carbon sink? Yes we can. That's what I, you know, I believe we can. We really need to work hard so that forests are sinks again. So how do we do that? Well, one, we've got to mitigate wildfire because, you know, wildfire emits a lot of CO2 and we're having increasing wildfire risk extent, severity, intensity over time. We need to reintroduce indigenous burning so that we can, you know, make the forests, you know, less risky, more healthy. We also have to deal with climate change, right? That's the big elephant in the room. And we need to be getting off of fossil fuels. We need to be going to renewable energy because until we address that, you know, fixing the forests at the same time is going to be continually under stress due to the warming of the planet.📌 文中提及的人物和组织
人物: Suzanne Simard, Craig Stewart
公司/组织: Insurance Bureau of Canada, Zillow, Royal LePage
媒体/书籍: When the Forest Breathes