Dave Jones
California Insurance Commissioner

As California’s Insurance Commissioner, Dave Jones leads the California Department of Insurance, a law enforcement and consumer protection agency. He regulates California’s insurance market – the largest insurance market in the United States, where insurers collect $310 billion a year in premiums.
Jones has saved consumers over $3 billion by rejecting excessive property and casualty insurance rates and he has recovered more than $84 million a year for consumers in response to consumer complaints and through investigations of insurers’ market conduct. Under his leadership the Department of Insurance handles 170,000 consumer calls for assistance a year and has investigated and arrested over 5,500 individuals for fraud and worked with prosecutors to secure their conviction. Jones licenses and regulates 1,100 insurance companies and 400,000 agents and brokers.
Dave Jones is an international and national leader on climate change and climate risk. Since his statewide election in 2010, Jones has led the administration of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) Climate Risk Disclosure Survey which asks over 1,000 insurance companies what they are doing to address climate change and climate risk in their business operations, underwriting and reserving, enabling regulators, insurance companies and interested members of the public the ability to identify trends, vulnerabilities and best practices with regard to the impact of climate change on the insurance industry. In 2016, concerned about the growing risk that fossil fuel investments could become “stranded assets,” on the books of insurers, Jones launched the Climate Risk Carbon Initiative that asks insurance companies to divest from investment in thermal coal and requires disclosure of all fossil fuel investments. Jones is Vice Chair of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) Climate Change and Global Warming Working Group. Commissioner Jones is the first insurance regulator in the United States to join the UNEP-PSI, and actively support the principles for sustainable insurance. Jones is also the Founding Chair of the international Sustainable Insurance Forum (SIF) — a working group of insurance supervisors from countries around the globe that strengthens insurance supervisors’ understanding of and responses to insurance sustainability challenges, with an emphasis on the impacts of climate change and climate risk. In 2018 Jones also launched the first-in-the-nation climate risk scenario testing of insurers’ investment portfolios. As a leader on climate risk and insurance regulation, Jones was invited to testify before the G-20 Financial Stability Board as it was forming the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Jones has been a major supporter of the Recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the first insurance regulator in the United States to begin implementing its recommendations.