Environmental risks are a subject of discussion across every form of insurance and indeed throughout every profession in the world, such is the overwhelming nature of our climate.
However, other than climate scientists, few people are as aware of environmental changes as indigenous communities.
Learn more about extreme weather insurance here.
A panel of indigenous experts spoke about their resilient communities at the Canadian Catastrophe Conference in Toronto.
Chief Matilda Ramjattan, of Lennox Island First Nation, off the coast of P.E.I., explained how her island was shrinking into the ocean as water levels rise.
Chief Ramjattan asked the mostly insurance professional crowd how to mitigate losing the land.
In the Akwesasne Mohawk territory, where the Quebec-Ontario border meets the US, wildfires consume the region every year and residents are often evacuated to nearby Cornwall, Ontario.
The Mohawk Council of Akwesasne’s emergency management officer,
Regina Jacobs, described some communities as living in “extreme weather conditions, year-round.”
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Working with Jacobs at the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne is
Scott Peters an environmental assessment officer who said he travels to First Nations communities around Ontario training them in emergency preparedness.
“The increased intensity of storms, all year, summer heat waves, winter you get cold spells with ice, higher wind, power outages, a lot of these places only have one road in and one road out,” Peters said.
“If that road is affected, they’re stuck there for months at a time with no way to get in and out with supplies.”
But those aren’t the only challenges Peters works to prevent.
“We have civil unrest, protests, because we’re at an international crossing (with the US) - they take advantage of it to shut it down, to stop traffic, it hits both sides economically,” Peters said.
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