Across neighborhoods in the U.S., something strange is happening. Homeowners are receiving notices from their insurance companies warning them, “Prune back those limbs overhanging your home or lose your coverage.” The offending branches? Those on trees that overhang roofs – even healthy, structurally sound trees and branches.

What might seem like a prudent safety policy is, in practice, triggering a wave of hasty removals, reckless pruning and potential long-term risk. The irony is thick; in trying to prevent damage, insurers often are creating the very conditions that make catastrophic failures more likely.

As a climbing arborist and someone embedded in the day-to-day fieldwork, I’ve seen firsthand how misguided policies like these backfire – leading to
lion’s-tailing, over-pruning, one-siding or full removals.

A year ago, I had never even heard of the issue. Now, our work calendar regularly sees multiple “insurance company requested prune” jobs each week. When we arrive on site, often we find a mature tree in perfect health. And yet, somehow an insurance agent operating in some office somewhere has demanded that our crew aggressively hack away at it.

What’s going on here?

A business decision
From the insurance company’s point of view, the logic is simple: fewer trees overhanging your roof, fewer potential claims when one of those limbs drops. Trees surrounding the home are, to the eyes of the underwriters, ticking time bombs, unnecessary risks that must be mitigated. Take a moment to picture your home from above, from a bird’s-eye perspective. Imagine the outline of the house as it would appear on an architect’s drafting board. Do any trees cross that line? Do any of their boughs, branches or even leads lean over and into that space? If you’re an insurance agent, those crossed lines are all you might need to see to insist upon action.

“We started to see this after Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana in 2021,” says Kenny Taylor, a founder of Gulf Region Insurance, a TCIA corporate member company in Metairie, Louisiana. He described the massive damage incurred by that storm and the associated costs. Underwriters – the people tasked with assessing risk – began to question whether to provide coverage to homeowners in storm-stricken regions, especially those with significant tree cover. If costs of tree cleanup could (and often did) exceed the cost of the repairs to the house, why not just get rid of the trees altogether?

Add to this the increasing frequency and intensity of storms, skyrocketing costs of building materials, labor and certain policy loopholes exploited by unscrupulous contractors, and you have a perfect storm for a nationwide “crackdown” on close-growing trees.

Remove it or lose it
Some insurance companies have made the mandate brutally simple – remove the hazard from your roofline or find someone else to insure you. This can leave homeowners scrambling. I’ve met with frustrated property owners who were given no more than 30 days to “fix the issue” or have their insurance policy canceled. (Several of them admitted that they had indeed been dropped by the time our crew arrived on site.)

In desperation, they may hire the first person with a saw, leading to hasty decisions and subpar outcomes. A once-healthy tree, now wounded and lopsided, becomes a far more serious risk.

Surely insurance companies take these factors into consideration – right?

Rick Weden with Corcoran and Havlin Insurance Group, an ArborMax agent and 16-year TCIA corporate member company based in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was quick to set me straight. I asked what sort of care or consideration is taken when evaluating trees on a property. His voice was animated.

“None! If an inspector says prune, you prune. If they say remove, you remove,” Weden says. “They might see a focal-point piece on a property and not know anything about it. Specimen white oak? Don’t know, don’t care. Go find another insurance company to cover you if you don’t want to cut it.”

I pushed back, looking for some grace or flexibility. He was resolute: “This is blood work. If you’re the insurance company, you’re saying, ‘We don’t care. Do it, or we’re gone.’ It’s just business. It’s a financial transaction, and financial transactions have one temperature – cold.”

It gets worse. Once a carrier issues a cancellation notice, homeowners are often required to disclose this to any potential new insurers. It creates a spiral of urgency and fear. Not to mention the reluctance of potential new insurers to accept a “canceled” homeowner as a new client. (There are options for a special type of insurance called a “Fair Plan” that might help homeowners who have been dropped and are having trouble being picked up again.)

Helping, or hurting?
On paper, removing overhanging limbs might not sound all that bad. A limb over a house is, after all, technically in a position to fall onto the house if it fails. But ask any arborist with science-backed knowledge and real-world experience, and you’ll hear the same thing – a healthy, balanced tree is not inherently risky.

In fact, removing the lower limbs on a trunk can create a more hazardous tree in more ways than one. Unbalanced trees are a risk, in ways we can understand from an entirely mechanical way if nothing else. But what about more nuanced risks? How about that lead with included bark that now has nothing to buffer it on its way down onto your roof when it cracks in a windstorm?

There aren’t enough Rick Wedens or Kenny Taylors out there to do this work, so what’s being used instead? Drones. A drone flyover may see shadows and branches, but it doesn’t see biology. It doesn’t know species, structure, health or wind loading. And yet, any overhang spotted from the sky is treated as a red flag.

Professional arborists, trained and certified to assess risk, are being sidelined. We’re playing a game on the insurer’s field, with rules they’re writing and rewriting in real time.

Risk mitigation
What insurance companies want is risk mitigation. What they’re often getting is compromised long-term viability. Start hacking away at a tree without a strategy and you invite decay, pests and structural imbalance. I’ve seen, with worrying frequency, a perfectly healthy oak, limbs arching gracefully over the roof, removed or butchered based on a snapshot.

For arborists, we’re stuck between a homeowner’s panic and the insurer’s demands, asked to perform bad work we know contradicts best practices. And if we refuse, someone else with a chain saw and no certification or scruples will be glad to do it. In the rush to eliminate perceived risk, real risk is often multiplied. And how do these over-pruned trees look in a year? Five years? Ten? Talk about risk!

Picture 30% or more of a canopy disappearing on a single side of a tree. It doesn’t take an engineering degree to figure out how badly these butchered trees might backfire on the very insurance adjusters who prescribed this in the first place. Several folks I interviewed made sure to remind me of the amount of training that most insurance underwriters have in tree biology, biomechanics and risk assessment – zero.

Ironically, that “big, scary” oak beside the home may actually reduce damage in a storm. Strategically retained vegetation buffers wind, slows rain, stabilizes soil and makes connections with other tree neighbors to ward off nature’s most intense assaults. Yes, trees can and do fail; our industry would be far smaller if this weren’t the case. But numerous studies, including work by Dr. Ed Gilman, demonstrate that well-
managed trees protect homes more than they threaten them. And yet, insurance policies continue to prioritize fast visuals over functional assessments.

A better way
If the insurance industry truly wants to reduce tree-related claims, there’s a better way.

First, trust the experts already working in the field. In Georgia, where I live, the Georgia Arborist Association (GAA) has built a suite of resources to help homeowners and insurers understand this issue. They advocate for involving ISA TRAQ-qualified practitioners, adhering to ANSI A300 standards and hiring certified arborists for all work. Their website contains helpful resources for homeowners struggling to keep up with this rapidly developing trend.

An initial thought for insurance companies: These entities could develop programs that incentivize homeowners to conduct tree-risk assessments – even offering policy discounts for those who maintain their trees through reputable companies. Offering the carrot, not the stick.

Second, move away from blanket mandates. Drone images may show silhouette, but risk lies in the structure, species and site. We need case-by-case evaluations, not across-the-board clearances.

Get involved
Eric Peterson, president of ArboRisk Insurance, a 16-year TCIA corporate member company based in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a TCIA Board member, and Jessie McClellan, executive director of the Georgia Arborist Association, are among those in the vanguard actively building this dialogue. We may not have a solution yet, but there are ways forward. Petersen is part of a newly developed task force at TCIA addressing this precise issue, while McClellan is behind many of the efforts that have been on display on the GAA’s resource page for homeowners.

If you’re a tree care professional, now is the time to speak up.

Get in touch with your state arborist association, urban-forestry council or municipal arborist. Chances are, there’s already a task force or committee working on this issue. Educate your clients. Let them know about local tree-preservation ordinances, and that insurance-mandated pruning may be in violation of those ordinances. Speak openly with your local municipal arborist. Insurance carriers don’t have legal authority to rewrite ordinances on a for-profit whim.

Encourage homeowners to ask for flexibility. In some cases, furnishing a certified tree-risk report has softened the hardline “no-overhang” stance. When insurers see that arborists are informed and willing to document decisions, it elevates the standard of what “risk management” means.

Conclusion
The trees we’re being asked to aggressively prune or remove are more than insurance liabilities. They make a house a home, a yard a sanctuary. They shade the porch, protect the roof and hold the swings that our children delight in.

Let’s find a way to work together. Let’s make room for nuance, for science and for cooperation.

Jim Kasper is an ISA Certified Arborist and Climber Specialist. He has a master’s degree in public health (MPH) and is a climber with Gill Tree Care in Decatur, Georgia.