Last week, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, announced that the state would stop insurance companies from dropping customers’ fire coverage in areas hit by 2021’s big wildfire infernos for one year. It builds on a regulatory change the commissioner pushed earlier this year to allow consumers to see their fire insurance “risk scores,” assigned them by insurers, and to force insurers to improve the scores of homeowners who undertake fire mitigation strategies on their properties.

The moratorium will give roughly 325,000 homeowners, spread across fire-hit regions of 22 counties, a temporary reprieve from what has become an annual nightmare in much of California: finding insurers willing to cover property in parts of the state increasingly vulnerable to fires as the region becomes a global epicenter of climate change impacts.

But the moratorium alone, and the risk score regulations, while providing breathing space, won’t fix a near-broken insurance […]