InnSure to financially award climate risk insurance innovators

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) selected Innsure, a nonprofit that supports insurance innovations addressing climate risks, to evaluate and award insurance innovators for the development of climate-related insurance products and policies through the Insurance Innovation for Climate-Technology Solutions program. 

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen M. Harris said in a news release, "NYSERDA is excited to work with InnSure to provide transformational insurance coverage for companies advancing technologies to fight climate change. This is a great example of how public-private partnerships can drive incentives and innovations that will help ease our transition to a clean-energy economy." 

InnSure will become the project manager for a future innovation design challenge, launching later this year, in which InnSure will provide insurance and climate technology expertise to create the statement and rules of the challenge. The nonprofit will also form the rules and panels for evaluations, select challenge winners and deploy awards.

InnSure is also building a data sandbox, the Climate Risk Insurance Sandbox (CRIS), to provide data that will help innovators develop new climate risk products and services by providing new datasets and enabling loss model testing. 

Innsure

Charlie Sidoti, executive director of InnSure, explains that InnSure wanted to "create a sandbox that can live on after the challenge, that can incentivize innovation going forward… And we are building an actual infrastructure, so it's not just datasets like was initially envisioned. It is a platform and then engagement model that enables people with new datasets to test their datasets and people with loss data to more rapidly see if data can work in developing insurance products and services."

Sidoti notes that there is a wide range of potential for innovation opportunities in addition to the many climate risk digital technologies currently available in insurance, such as nuclear and solar energy solutions, insurtechs focused on carbon offset credits and the adoption of telematics products. 

Sidoti adds that the collaboration with NYSERDA aligns with InnSure's goal to combat climate change through projects that address and research climate risk. When Innsure was initially launched in 2019 in partnership with Cambridge Innovation Center, the nonprofit's original focus was on fostering insurtech.

"But we evolved fairly quickly to this focus on innovation in insurance, focused on climate change.... we look at it through the lens of how better insurance products and services can help society," Sidoti says. "We have these four impact pillars... essentially, we think better insurance products and services can help close the protection gap, accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy, incentivize more resilient communities and promote nature positive practices. That's our mission."