Insuring Climate Change: New Risks and the Financialization of Nature

Razmig Keucheyan

Development and Change, 2018, vol. 49, issue 2, 484-501

Abstract: Insurance is a central institution in modern societies. Economic and technological developments generate ‘new risks’, which are often covered by new forms of insurance. Because of its underlying uncertainty — the difficulty both of predicting its effects and evaluating its costs — climate change represents a major challenge for the insurance industry. It also represents a challenge for states, who have historically played the role of insurers ‘of last resort’ in the event of catastrophes. This article examines the ongoing financialization of climate risk insurance, which is part of a larger trend of financialization of nature. Financialization, through measures such as ‘catastrophe bonds’, is the neoliberal solution to the rising costs of natural disasters which the insurance industry has experienced since the 1990s. The article analyses the effects of financialization on the insurance industry, on the state's role as insurer ‘of last resort’, and on associated forms of knowledge production (big data), critiquing the process of financialization on both economic and political grounds.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12367

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:devchg:v:49:y:2018:i:2:p:484-501

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0012-155X

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Development and Change from International Institute of Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().