A new poll out of IAG New Zealand shows more New Zealanders appear to be less personally concerned about climate change than a year ago.
General insurer IAG, which trades under its AMI, State, NZI, NAC, Lumley and Lantern brands, released its latest climate poll on Monday.
It found 61% of respondents had become more concerned about climate change in recent years compared to 74% in the insurer’s 2023 climate poll. And 72% of people surveyed thought climate change was an important issue to them personally, down from 81% of respondents in 2023, the year when Auckland suffered Anniversary Weekend floods and much of the North Island was hit by Cyclone Gabrielle.
This year’s poll found 76% of respondents said they were equally or more concerned about how climate change will impact them, than their impact on climate change. This is compared to 37% a year ago.
IAG has been commissioning the climate poll for seven years on an annual basis and this year’s poll – which was conducted by market research firm Ipsos – surveyed 1,005 people.
This year’s poll found 31% of those surveyed said it was “okay” to charge people more for their insurance, regardless of whether they could afford it, while 41% of respondents disagreed.
Another 31% of respondents agreed insurers should stop insuring people in locations where the risk was deemed to be too great but 39% disagreed on this.
While 53% said the Government should “step in” when insurers stop insuring high-risk locations, 64% of those surveyed said the Government needed to step in when house and contents insurance becomes unaffordable.
Another 61% of respondents said the Government’s main focus should be around reducing the risks of climate hazards to bring insurance costs down.
Parliament has been warned recently that the increasing frequency of major natural hazard events is causing global reinsurers to reassess NZ’s risk profile.
The Finance and Expenditure Committee is currently undertaking a climate inquiry after being given the responsibility of working out how NZ manages the risks and expenses associated with future extreme weather events.
The inquiry plans to provide recommendations and principles on a climate adaptation framework and report back to Climate Change Minister Simon Watts on the 5th September.
The majority of respondents in IAG’s 2024 climate poll – 90% – said they expected to see more frequent and extreme floods.
A similar number – 89% – expect coastal area flooding to go up due to sea-level rise while 87% anticipate more frequent and extreme storms.
Of those surveyed, 68% believed they will be affected by the impacts of future natural hazards.
IAG Chief Executive Amanda Whiting said recent weather events like the North Island’s Cyclone Gabrielle and Auckland Anniversary floods were still on people’s minds.
“The number of claims and amount of money paid out only partially reflects the true social and economic cost of natural hazard events,” she said.
“We need to do a better job at reducing natural hazard risk, particularly for our most hazard-prone communities.”
She said it was “impossible” to remove all risk as NZ was going to continue to experience floods, storms, earthquakes and other disasters. However, the country needed a “strong insurance industry” to support faster recovery from these sorts of events.
First layer
The Natural Hazards Commission (NHC) said on Monday new research from NielsenIQ showed that only a third of New Zealanders properly understand their insurance.
The Commission has launched a campaign to bring more awareness around natural hazard insurance.
The NielsenIQ report revealed that only 33% of insured homeowners are confident in the case of a natural hazard event of knowing what damage to their home would or wouldn't be covered by insurance.
And only 26% of people were confident that they understood what they’d be covered for when it came to damage to their land.
Chief Executive Tina Mitchell said NZ was a country particularly prone to natural hazards and people understanding their insurance cover was “critical”.
The NHC provides a “first layer” of insurance for natural hazards damage to insured residential homes and some land of generally up to $300,000.
Everyone with a home insurance policy pays a levy into a fund that provides a contribution towards repairs if your insured property is damaged by a natural hazard.
A natural hazards insurance premium, or levy, is collected by private insurers and then paid into the Natural Disaster Fund (NDF) and the Crown Guarantee – both of which are managed by the NHC.
The natural hazards insurance levy is 16 cents per $100 and up to the maximum amount of cover from the scheme ($300,000), which means the levy is capped at $480.
11 Comments
Well yes with councils canning the usual essential infrastructure investment and opting instead to let communities flood by stopping development of flood protections or to burn by stopping clearance & increasing risks or to have more air pollution by encouraging local fires to be more climate change friendly & green it is easy to see how those people with homes and family in those communities might be more concerned for their safety.
Then we get into the removal and destruction of local transport access, especially to essential needs like medical care. After all who doesn't feel up to a little death of family members to common viruses, infections and minor injuries. Let alone the complete lack of access to specialist care.
Yep given the council failures after they have been proven to have repeatedly withdrawn focus on essential community safety in favour of more white elephants it is no wonder coming out in the wash with insurance company surveys. You cannot live through a council failure completely untouched & unharmed, that is if you were lucky to have family survive through it.
Don't forget NZ is also more highly prone to non climate change related hazards. Earthquakes and volcanic activity (including geothermal events) make it a place more at risk to natural hazards even before the climate was significantly changing rapidly. We don't have buried villages and memorials around the country dotted with shield volcanoes just because we really like the tourism & walk to them.
This year’s poll found 76% of respondents said they were equally or more concerned about how climate change will impact them, than their impact on climate change. This is compared to 37% a year ago.
So I read this as people are moving onto the later stages of climate denial. It's going from "climate change not happening" to "it is happening but nothing I can do about it". We'll that's progress at least.
If something was done to cut emissions during the "it's not happening" stage, our future would be less full of potential risk, but the profits from the burn have been banked, and everyone on the planet takes on the higher risks of externalities. If only there was a way to tax deniers at a higher rate, seeing as they're usually user pays types?
I'm afraid I just don't get this.
Where I live, the temperature's normal, the rainfall is just below average, there's no flooding, there's no heat waves, the winters have been colder than usual for the last 2 years.
Pretty sure this all another mania that dupes get wrapped up in, like acid rain and oil running out. There'll certainly be lots of hangers-on milking it for all it's worth. Like the city fathers in Baku lining up for an influx of hundreds of jets shortly for COP29
I've been interested in manias for as long a I can remember...sheep syndrome if you like.
It's everywhere you look, all the time, but the first big one I can recall was in 1980...the silver price spiked nearly vertically, it was the talk of the town. And then crashed, Silver Thursday it was called.
Oil running out has been going on for decades, it's like the boy crying wolf, no one takes any notice anymore.
The 1987 stock market crash was a real doozy, I sold out after visiting the stock exchange in Auckland and watching enthusiastic punters screaming and yelling and one dude yells out..."and there's another new car".
The global warming mania seems to be losing a little of its impetus recently, possibly people invested in this frenzy are beginning to be a little sceptical.
You don't listen.
I explained - as did others - about the difference between 'running out' and peaking.
When did you stop thinking properly? War there a time, an incident, or a personal reason?
But not listening is definitely your problem. Interestingly, Flying High has exactly the same problem.
It depends entirely on which 'expert' you're listening to, because there's lots of them.
In 1957 the residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma buried a Plymouth Belvedere as part of a time capsule with tins of gasoline. It was to be opened in 50 years to show the locals how we got around, because they said in 2007 there wouldn't be any oil left.
Hubbert's peak oil theory, which gained lots of traction, suggested that oil production in the lower 48 would have crashed by 2016, but actual production is increasing. To put it bluntly, Hubbert's theory bombed.
There's been plenty of erroneous predictions over the decades - peak tin, peak coal, peak water, peak helium, peak copper et. al...they've all been wrong.
I used to go to school with a guy who's now a very senior cleric in the Church. My father had a shop just off Queen St., and in 1969 there was protest march up Queen St about Omega, a new navigation system, which was subsequently overtaken by GPS. This friend of mine participated and at the end of the march dropped in to see my father. When my father criticised the march and told him he knew nothing about Omega, my friend replied, "it's not every day you get to march up Queen St".
Baaa baaa
The Hubbert - Gaussian, essentially - curve, is irrefutable for single fields, nations, and the planet.
You fall at the time gate - too short a view. And conventional oil peaked in the lower 40, in 1970. And hasn't looked back. Nobody said we were 'running out' - folk like Hubbert merely suggested that the beyond-peak resource would be harder and harder to get. As it has proven - the fracking splurge is both of a reduced EROEI, and from wells which deplete rapidly. In this time-frame, and given the enormity of the implications, 20 years is nothing - but 20 years of inactivity was probably, in hindsight, the undoing of our civilisation.
It must just be a cranial-wiring thing - you seem quite genuine, but you posit flawed if/then sequences. Yours are more like then/if...
I saw a guy on TV being dragged off the motorway by the police and holding up lots of very angry motorists in Wellington the other day. He said to the camera "you'll all be dead in 10 years time".
I really do believe that gullibility is more prevalent in NZers than say in the USA, maybe because we're in a remote area of the world.
There was an anti-apartheid demo in Auckland years ago, gang members attended in large numbers. Does anyone really think gang members care one iota about apartheid? No, they were there to stir up trouble, and they did.
There's hundreds of thousands being killed and wounded in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, cities are being levelled, but kiwis couldn't care less about that for some reason.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.