Florida is governed by contradiction. As a Mississippi man myself, I’m no stranger to this phenomenon. While my state government touts its business friendliness, our economy is consistently among the worst in the Union, and it has been my entire life. Similarly, Florida’s government is hostile to climate risk management while being one of the most vulnerable states to the impacts of climate change.
At the state level, it’s policy to deny climate change. In a recent lawsuit, Florida’s Attorney General seeks to force climate denial on private industry. A Complaint filed last week against First Street seeks to use state power to silence climate risk management data. First Street is a company that provides flood risk assessments to property buyers. These assessments are based on an open-source methodology which provides an alternative to FEMA flood maps. The Florida AG argues that these flood ratings are false and misleading, largely because the models diverge from FEMA standards:
“Complex predictive modeling is inherently speculative and deviates across
vendors. Yet First Street deceptively represents that its property-level assessments are ‘accurate’ while failing to disclose the inherent uncertainty in their predictions. For example, some models may predict significant property-level risk for a particular home, while other models predict nearly no risk for the same home. And particularly important to those predictions is accurate property information that may be known to a property owner or local urban planners but is not readily available to input into First Street’s models. Both home sellers and homebuyers are deprived of that opportunity by First Street’s conclusive and unexplained Risk Factor results, as well as First Street’s unwillingness to provide its underlying data outside the protection of a paywall”
The lawsuit repeatedly cites the company’s divergence from FEMA maps to evidence Florida’s consumer protection claims. However, FEMA flood maps are increasingly unreliable and subject to political interference. An analysis from NPR indicates that FEMA maps underrepresented the flood risks that resulted in the tragic 2025 flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas. That flooding took the lives of 28 people, mostly children. First Street’s parallel analysis of Camp Mystic correctly identified the risks that FEMA missed. Back in April, I explained why FEMA maps are growing less accurate as climate change makes historical data less reliable. If the Florida AG gets his way, Floridians will be forced to rely solely on outdated government methodologies, the same methodologies that failed to avoid tragedy.
This has serious implications for home buyers, but also for companies. What is unfolding in Florida courts could explode into a new type of political risk. The Florida AG’s position would leave climate data collection and analysis to the mercy of climate denialists. That will hamstring resilience efforts and physical risk mitigation. It undermines free markets and leaves judgments on data modeling in the hands of the government, rather than asset owners. When it comes to ESG, companies have to pick their battles. This particular battle may be the most important yet. Following this case, anti-ESG may start litigating against other climate data firms. Predictive modeling couldn’t diverge from the EPA, FEMA, or any other government agency. This will leave risk managers flying blind, or worse, forced to make poor decisions based on the whims of the government.
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