REGISTER
The technical world of insurance is a critical lens through which to understand the escalating crises in climate change and housing. As climate risks intensify, both public and private homeowner insurance markets face unprecedented pressure, revealing the interconnections between housing affordability, wealth inequality, and the broader financialization of our communities. This panel brings together experts to explore the intersection of insurance, housing, and climate.
The panel will feature Stephen Collier, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley; Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Dave Jones, Senior Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. Meg Mills-Novoa, Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group, will moderate. This panel is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, the Department of Geography, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).
Panelists
Stephen Collier is Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare. He is the author of Post-Soviet Social (Princeton, 2011) and, with Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency (Princeton, 2021). His current work addresses fire risk, insurance, and urban adaptation in California, the topic of two articles currently under review: “Insurance and the ‘Irrationalization’ of Disaster Policy” and “Disorderly Urban Adaptation to Climate Change.” His previous publications on insurance include “Enacting Catastrophe” (Economy and Society, 2008), “Neoliberalism and Natural Disaster” (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2014), “Climate Change and Insurance” (Economy and Society, 2021), “Governing Urban Resilience” (Economy and Society, 2021), and “The Disaster Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism” (Geoforum, 2025).
Desiree Fields is an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, where she is also a faculty affiliate with Global Metropolitan Studies and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. She also co-leads an interdisciplinary research group concerned with digital transformations in global land, housing, and property. She is a critical economic geographer and urban scholar. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship investigate property, finance, and technology with a focus on how they reproduce social and spatial hierarchies in the United States. At its core, her work is about how these processes of economic and technological change unevenly restructure urban space and the social relations of land and housing.
Dave Jones is the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) He was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021 and a Distinguished Fellow with the ClimateWorks Foundation. Jones served two terms as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 to 2018. He led the Department of Insurance and was responsible for regulating the largest insurance market in the United States Jones pioneered insurance regulatory best practices regarding climate risk, including requiring insurers to disclose fossil fuel investments, asking insurers to divest from coal investment, implementing climate risk scenario analysis on insurer investment portfolios, and serving as founding chair of the international consortium of insurance regulators focused on climate risk (Sustainable Insurance Forum). Jones has testified before Congress, state legislatures, the G-20 Financial Stability Board, and numerous regulatory agencies, about the need for financial regulators to address climate change and the risks it poses to the financial system. Jones has degrees from DePauw University (B.A.) and Harvard University (JD/MPP).
Meg Mills-Novoa (moderator) is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group. Meg is the director of the Climate Futures Lab, a hub for social science research on the impact and equity of climate change responses. As a human-environment geographer, her research focuses on climate change adaptation and decarbonization. She uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, from spatial analysis and quantitative surveys to archival research and interviews. She collaborates closely with communities and practitioners to improve the design, implementation, and outcomes of adaptation and energy transition initiatives that promote inclusion and equity. Regionally, Meg is working with communities across the Arid Americas, including the Andes (Ecuador) and Great Basin (U.S.).