Insurance companies sue cities that don't prepare for global warming

To insurance companies, there’s no doubt that climate change is here: They are beginning to file lawsuits against small towns and cities who they say haven’t prepared for the floods and storms that will cost the companies billions in payments.

Earlier this week, the U.S. arm of a major global insurance company backed away from an unprecedented lawsuit against Chicago and its suburbs for failing to prepare for heavy rains and associated flooding it claimed were fueled by global warming. While legal experts said the case was a longshot, its withdrawal didn't alter the message it contained for governments: prepare now for climate change or pay the price.

After several days of ground-saturating rain last April, an early-morning train of intense storm cells passed over the greater Chicago area and overwhelmed the region's stormwater and sewage systems. Water gushed out of sewer inlets and backed up into basements.

"There was just nowhere for this water to go," Marilyn Sucoe, the stormwater administrator for the Village of Lisle, a ring suburb west of Chicago that was affected by the flooding, told NBC News.

The village was among about 200 municipalities named in the nine class-action lawsuits filed in March by Farmers Insurance Group.

It was "the first loud shot in what I think will be a long-term set of litigation battles over failure to prepare for climate change," Michael Gerrard, who directs the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York, told NBC News.

The subsidiary of the international firm Zurich Insurance Group argued in its lawsuit that the cities knew climate change had raised the frequency, duration, and intensity of regional rainfall since the 1970s and acknowledged vulnerabilities to increased flooding by adopting a Climate Action Plan in 2008.

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