The Great Adaptation: Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe by Romain Felli

Author:Romain Felli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

OVERCOMING CLIMATE CHANGE WITH INSURANCE

The tarnished image of microcredit has not, however, made any dent in the reputation that microinsurance today enjoys. On the same model as its predecessors, it relies on the principle that tiny streams make up great rivers, and even if the poor do not have a lot in the way of possessions, they do have the advantage of their weight of numbers.

Microinsurance owes its rise to belief in the gospel of adaptation to global warming. Why should poor peasants be particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming? The problem is presented by insurers as a matter of risks and how they are managed. Since they are resource-deprived, poor peasants do not have a margin of security that would allow them easily to survive bad harvests. One bad season, one insufficient harvest, and they will have to sell their reserves, their tools or their livestock. And selling these things will deprive them of the means by which to raise crops in the season that follows.

Yet global warming has the effect of increasing climate variability – in other words, of creating more uncertainty and thus more risks. Temperature fluctuations and precipitation increases make it more difficult to forecast the meteorological conditions in which production will take place. Here we again come across the theme of the growing uncertainty of the world and the ontology of risk, which characterises the theories of adaptation and resilience. Their goal, we should remember, is not to push back against the sources of global warming, but rather to mitigate its consequences, in a context posed as essentially impossible to know or to plan for.

Insurance multinationals and their counterparts in reinsurance (insurers for insurers) are among the most active capitalist industries on the terrain of global warming. 27 And in recent years they have turned toward adaptation. The world’s largest reinsurance firm, Munich Re, finances research programmes, research grants, reports and conferences concerning the management of climate risks. In 2005 it founded the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) within the United Nations University (UNU) to serve as the ideological spearhead for promoting an entrepreneurial vision of adaptation that would prepare a large role for the private insurance sector. Particularly active in global climate governance circles, they intervene at the COP and other sites of international climate policy and expertise.

Indeed, at the Annapolis seminar in 1978, Dean Mann had well understood that ‘in the context of an adaptive strategy … an approach that would emphasize the private sector would be the inclusion of the insurance industry as a major actor in dealing with climate change. Either with or without government involvement, perhaps through some reinsurance arrangement, the private insurance industry might participate by insuring against the potential effects of the consequences of climate changes’. 28

Insurers and their political and scholarly outriders today present insurance as a solution that makes it possible to mitigate the structural uncertainty driven by global warming. By mutualising the risks, insurance makes it possible to ‘spread out’ its effects among the population.

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