An aerial view of people driving vehicles through a flooded residential neighborhood street after localized heavy rain on Dec. 18, 2024, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Five hurricanes made landfall in the United States this year , causing half a trillion dollars in damages . Flooding devastated mountain towns along the East Coast. Scores of wildfires burned almost 8 million acres nationwide . As such events grow more common, and more devastating, homeowners are seeing their insurance premiums spike — or insurers ditch them all together. This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here . Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. An analysis released by the Senate Committee on the Budget found that the rate at which insurance contracts are being dropped rose significantly in recent years, particularly in states most exposed to climate risks. In all, 1.9 million policies were not renewed. “Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who chairs the budget committee, said at a hearing on the matter . “It is an economic threat, and it is an affordability issue that we should not ignore.” Support for LAist comes from Become a sponsor Premiums increase For those with insurance, premiums rose 44% between 2011 and 2021, and another 11% last year, according to another report from the congressional Joint Economic Committee. A Democratic analyst on the Joint Economic Committee, or JEC, who requested anonymity to comment publicly, said: “The model of insurance as it stands right now isn’t working.” The JEC report included a state-by-state breakdown of premium increases and risk ranking based on climate perils. Florida topped the list on both fronts, and saw a whopping […]