Extreme weather events, previewed by those the U.S. has seen all summer, “pose significant challenges to our financial system and our ability to sustain long-term economic growth,” Behnam said in a statement.

Calls by corporate executives for a tougher government stance have had little success during President Trump’s administration as officials have reversed policies implemented to cut emissions and the U.S. is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Yesterday’s report includes a series of non-binding recommendations, but it could serve as a blueprint if Democratic candidate Joe Biden wins the White House in November.

Carbon pricing

The U.S. should price greenhouse gas pollution to ensure that financial markets reduce risks “consistent with the Paris Agreement,” the report said. Its authors stressed how unprepared financial markets are to deal with climate change, warning that without a carbon price “capital will continue to flow in the wrong direction, rather than toward accelerating the transition to a net-zero emissions economy.”

Using carbon pricing to lower emissions has seen some success in Europe, where the rising cost of allowances and cheaper natural gas have helped reduce the role of coal in the power sector, leading to an 8.3% drop in emissions last year. The U.S. has some regional carbon markets, led by California’s, but nothing close to Europe’s scale.

Bob Litterman, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive and founding partner of Kepos Capital who chairs the CFTC advisory committee, led the call for U.S. carbon pricing in the group’s report. Litterman has spent much of the last decade writing and speaking about how a basic economic principle — that people respond to price incentives — applies to climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions inflict a cost on society that is not reflected in market energy prices, he has argued, and a carbon price is the most efficient way to fix it.

Nathaniel Bullard, chief content officer of BloombergNEF, is a member of the CFTC climate-risk subcommittee, which also included representatives from Marsh & McLennan Cos., Citigroup Inc., Cargill Inc. and ConocoPhillips.

A unanimous report from such a diverse collection of authors could also be a political signal to the ultimate authority in carbon policy: the U.S. Congress. There are existing laws that enable regulators to help markets deal with climate risk, including mandating material disclosures to protect investors and ensuring institutions have the ability to absorb climate-related losses.

Still, the threat goes beyond the finance industry, according to Jesse Keenan, a Tulane University professor who was an editor of the report. “This isn’t just about Wall Street,” he said. “This is about the entirety of the U.S. financial system, and that includes our housing and labor markets as well.” — Eric Roston and Ben Bain, Bloomberg

The unprecedented disclosures will dramatically increase the public’s understanding of flood risk and could prompt property owners and communities to mitigate potential damage as climate change intensifies flooding, analysts said.

“The more data, the better,” said Laura Lightbody, who has advocated for disclosure laws as project director of the flood-prepared communities initiative at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Joel Scata of the Natural Resources Defense Council said the information “will address a major shortcoming,” though he added that laws are still needed to inform prospective homebuyers of a property’s flood history.

Realtor.com attracts 86 million visitors a month and is the 78th-most visited website among U.S. browsers, according to Alexa.

The flood score is derived from a groundbreaking nationwide analysis released in June by the nonprofit First Street Foundation, which estimated current and future flood risk of 140 million properties.

The scores range from 1 through 10, with 1 indicating minimal flood risk over the duration of a 30-year mortgage and 10 indicating an extreme risk.

Visitors who click on a flood score will connect to First Street’s website, floodfactor.com, that shows each property’s chance of flooding over the next 30 years and flood risks in the neighborhood and the county. Floodfactor.com also shows the number of properties flooded in recent major storms but does not show which properties were flooded.

First Street’s unprecedented parcel-by-parcel modeling drew national attention by showing that the number of properties facing a 1% annual chance of being flooded is roughly twice as large as estimated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The First Street analysis also shows that the number of at-risk properties will increase from 14.6 million to 16.2 million by 2050.

“Every homeowner and homebuyer benefits from this,” First Street founder and Executive Director Matthew Eby said of the data-sharing agreement with realtor.com. “The owners now have what wasn’t available before — a full-parcel understanding of flood risk today and how it will change over the next 30 years as the environment changes.”

Realtor.com will show the flood score and flood zone that each property occupies according to FEMA maps that establish whether a property sits inside a high-risk area and must be covered by flood insurance.

Flood data for the masses

The disclosures could forestall situations in which homebuyers back out of purchases at the last minute when they find out that a property they were planning to buy has significant flood risk, said Leslie Jordan of realtor.com.

“It’s best for consumers to understand this data early in the process,” Jordan said.

The flood information also could give realtor.com an advantage over competitors such as Trulia and Zillow.

“This is the only site that’s going to be able to provide [information on] one of the most costly natural disasters and help people understand what they need to have in place to protect themselves,” Jordan said.

Realtor.com lists owner-occupied homes, rentals and units that are for sale or off the market. It provides information such as home size, sales history, estimated value and comparable homes. Realtor.com calls itself the official site of the National Association of Realtors, a trade association for 1.4 million real estate agents and other professionals.

The disclosures could depress property values in areas with significant flood risk, particularly in inland areas where the threat may not be as apparent as in coastal regions.

“The data will bring the true risk to the forefront for a bunch of areas where people maybe thought the risk wasn’t that high from precipitation or riverine flooding,” Eby of First Street said.

He called the disclosures a consumer protection tool that will give individuals the same information as institutional investors who use sophisticated flood analyses to decide where they should and shouldn’t invest in real estate.

“What we see ourselves doing is democratizing that data so we’re leveling the playing field,” Eby said.

Lightbody of Pew agreed.

“This empowers consumers more,” she said. “At the very minimum, this provides consumers more information to make an informed choice. Prior to this, there was very little information out there.”

Lightbody also praised realtor.com and First Street for disclosing flood risk for rental properties “because that is often left out of these discussions.”

The disclosures come as environmental advocates and lawmakers push for federal and state laws that would require homebuyers to be told about the flood history of a property they are considering purchasing.

Those laws are still needed “to truly provide a complete picture of a home’s flood risk,” said Scata of NRDC. “A home that has flooded once is capable of being hit again, especially as flooding becomes more common due to climate change.”