New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance Acting Commissioner Justin Zimmerman will be required to publicly report information on how insurers are addressing and preparing for increasing climate change impacts.
Using the Climate Risk Disclosure Survey, insurers will report on climate-related risks and opportunities, which will provide the department with valuable information to evaluate insurance company risks and activities.
“The department is committed to Gov. [Phil] Murphy’s vision to ensure New Jersey remains a leader in combating climate change, preparing for its impact and mitigating environmental harms,” Zimmerman said. “By joining states from across the country in this important effort, the department will gain additional regulatory tools to protect New Jersey consumers. This initiative will improve transparency of insurers’ business activities and enhance the department’s ability to assess an insurers preparedness and resiliency related to climate-related risks.”
With this requirement, New Jersey joins insurance regulators from 26 other United States jurisdictions that are implementing the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ (NAIC) Climate Risk Disclosure Survey. The recently revised survey aligns with the guidelines of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The TCFD standard is the international benchmark for climate risk disclosure and will help insurance regulators and the public to better understand the climate-related risks to the U.S. insurance market, which is the largest in the world.
A bulletin accompanying the announcement states, “For the current survey, reporting year 2022, all participating insurers are required to report using the Task Force on Climate related Financial Disclosure (TCFD)-aligned NAIC Climate Risk Survey. The TCFD-aligned survey was established and implemented last reporting year after being developed by the ’Climate Risk Disclosure’ workstream of the NAIC’s Climate Risk and Resilience Executive Committee Task Force. The NAIC Climate Risk and Resiliency Executive Committee Task Force has prioritized TCFD reporting for the past four years. For guidance on the survey, reference the NAIC Climate Risk Disclosure Survey document.
“All insurance companies who are licensed in the state of New Jersey and who collected direct written premium amounts of more than $100 million dollars nationwide during 2022 must respond to the survey for New Jersey; except for insurers required to respond to the survey by one of the partner states and jurisdictions. Insurers required to respond to the survey by another partner state or jurisdiction may instead respond to that particular state or jurisdiction,” the bulletin continued. “Each insurance company will receive a notice from the insurance regulator that will act as the point-of-contact for that company.
“The completed survey responses are due Aug. 31, 2023. Please register and submit your survey responses by going to the survey registration on our interactive web application and following the submission instructions,” the bulletin stated. “Insurance companies have the option to submit the TCFD-aligned Climate Risk Disclosure Survey through text boxes or through a PDF document. All responses should be self-contained within the text boxes or a single document.”