PROVIDENCE — With summer over, Rhode Island’s student population aren’t the only ones who have headed back to school; state lawmakers are also hitting the books.

The General Assembly’s active study commissions have been meeting in recent weeks, some for the first time since lawmakers exited the legislative session some three months ago. For the environmentally minded commissions on Smith Hill in the off-term, flooding and climate change are on the agenda.

Last week saw the inaugural meeting of the House’s study commission investigating the flooding of the Pawtuxet River. The commission was created from a House resolution (H5847) sponsored by Rep. Earl Read, D-Coventry, who has also been elected as its chair.

In his opening remarks as chair, Read said the Pawtuxet River had seen some serious flooding in recent years, including during the back-to-back storms in December 2023 and January 2024. The floods, Read said, caused serious damage in the towns in the river’s watershed, and sent a lot of sediment downstream.

“What I want to do with this commission is recommend the safest, most efficient measures that can give us long-term stability of the Pawtuxet River,” he said. “I’m not sure if that means legislation, proposing processes, proposing maintenance, proposing fixes to the river or dredging or what have you.”

The commission will have until March to submit its findings to the General Assembly on ways to mitigate the river’s flooding. Some of the proposed solutions the commission will investigate include dredging, constructing levees or other riverbank hardening infrastructure, improving storm drains, and utilizing rain gardens.

In a sign of pleasing symmetry, or more likely, just a sign of climate change, Read’s commission dovetailed with a similar study commission meeting held in the House the day before, and gave observers some insight into how the legislature is thinking about climate change.

The second study commission, on climate change impacts and solutions, is a remake of a previous House study commission from a decade prior. Rep. Terri Cortvriend, D-Portsmouth, introduced legislation last year for an updated investigation on how climate change is impacting Rhode Island.

Cortvriend’s commission, which includes representatives from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, environmental groups, statewide planners, and coastal policy analysts has been meeting since last year and to date has heard presentations on emergency and disaster planning, state environmental officials, and as of last week, flooding.

The commission heard a presentation from Charlie Sidoti, executive director of InnSure, a nonprofit incubator focused on making insurance viable in a world impacted by climate change, and Steve Brandt, InnSure’s chief development officer.

“Risks are increasing because of climate change, which is causing the drive toward more catastrophes, and that risk needs to be managed,” Sidoti said. “That’s why you see states investing in physical resiliency.”

Sidoti also told commissioners the insurance industry didn’t understand enough about green- or nature-based solutions to resiliency projects and gaps in insurance protection were flowing downstream into municipal budgets.

Sixty percent of all catastrophe losses were uninsured, according to a study released by Willis Towers Watson, a British insurance multinational. Meanwhile, 13% of all individuals have no insurance at all. Federal disaster relief is also fading just as climate change is turning the dial up on storm events and flooding across the nation.

Sidoti told commissioners the way traditional insurance innovates has failed: typically an insurance giant with plenty of capital imposes new policies and ameliorates risk from the top down, rarely knowing anything specific that differentiates one community’s insurance from another.

“We want to create an environment where communities identify what they need and the insurance industry has chances to respond, or other innovators can respond, quite frankly,” Sidoti said.

Sidoti said the way to do this is have communities begin planning around insurability, using the data they have from resilience projects to begin shaping the insurance industry that way.

Insurance has been something of a canary in the coal mine for climate change impacts. Earlier this year, Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation chief Elizabeth Dwyer told Cortvriend’s study commission that home insurance rates in the state are expected to rise, and most homeowners lack flood insurance, since the state doesn’t require that coverage.

In 2021 the Federal Emergency Management Agency began including climate risk in costs of flood insurance, resulting in a drastic increase for policy holders nationwide. A flood policy that cost $1,000 in 2021 was estimated to cost up to $5,230 by the end of the decade and explode to $27,400 in two decades.

The Rhode Island Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan, administered through the Rhode Island Joint Reinsurance Association, has added 2,000 additional policies to its risk pool in the last two years, an indication homeowners aren’t getting the coverage they need via the private insurance market.

The National Flood Insurance Program, which was established in 1968 to fill a coverage gap left by private insurers who declined to cover flooding, meanwhile, was $20 billion in debt in 2021.

“Ultimately what the insurance needs to create new products [to close the gap] is analytics around the costs and a specific belief they are accurate and stable,” Sidoti said.

“If the insurance company doesn’t believe it, then who does believe in it?” asked Brandt. “Usually it’s going to be the people in that community, usually the people in that state who spent the money, did the work, and understood the risk from the beginning.

“It’s going to be the public sector that says we believe we lowered the risk, we’ll take that risk, that it’s good risk, even if the insurance industry will not,” Brandt added.

Both study commissions are scheduled to continue to meet throughout the legislative offseason, with their current terms ending sometime next year, although in the past lawmakers have always been receptive to extensions.