Insurance, Climate-Risk and the Barriers to Change

Herbstein, Tom; Froestad, Jan; Nel, Deon; Shearing, Clifford

doi:10.1057/9781137302748.0014

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The still-nascent generation of practices and thoughts on these issues points us in useful, and sometimes contradictory, directions, with which theoretical and empirical scholarship is slowly grappling (Wood et al, 2019). Ideas and theories both outside (Wood et al, 2019;Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000;De Búrca, Keohane and Sabel, 2014 and inside criminological scholarship (Ericson and Carriere, 1994;O'Malley, 2018;Nel, Shearing and Reyers, 2011;Herbstein et al, 2013;South, 2015: 273;Hall and Farrall, 2013: 126-127) have begun to explain, understand and reform the role of private actors in governance global finance and insurance industry, and this edited book seeks to add to the endeavour.…”

Section: Environmental Security Finance and Insurancementioning

confidence: 99%

Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities

Holley¹,

Phelan²,

Shearing³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. African ProverbThis book arises at a time when our skies are dark, and are becoming darker.There is now irrefutable evidence that the temperate era of the last 12, 000 years, the Holocene era, is drawing to a close. We are moving towards a series of tipping points that could well bring an end to the nurturing 'ecological assemblages' (Trisos, Merow andPigot, 2020) andSchumacher's (1973) 'natural capital', which provided humans and many other species with the provision of essential 'ecosystem services ' (Farber et al., 2002). During this now vanishing era the earth has been characterised by what Rockström et al. (2009: 1) have termed 'planetary boundaries' that provide a 'safe operating space for humanity'.The warning that these dark clouds carry with them is that we humans have been, especially since we have begun living in industrial societies, systematically destroying the very basis of our existence -an engagement that Brisman and South (2018) compare with self-cannibalism, autosarcophagy. This autosarcophagy has been, and remains, the consequence of carbon intensive economies --ways of being, built on fire and the heat it produces (Hartmann, 1999).Hidden in these dark clouds is the spectre of collapse (Diamond, 2005), a collapse that, as Umair Haque (2019) has recently argued, emerges from the bottom up. This is a collapse of the biospheric foundations (see also Smil, 2002), upon which CrimRxiv Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities 3 humans, as biophysical and social creatures, depend for their existence and upon which they have built their worlds. Yet, despite this complete dependence on these foundations, humans have collectively paid very little, if any, attention to them.The consequences in this 'age of collapse ', according to Hague (2019), is that 'the bottom [is] depleted, which causes the middle to implode, which takes the top away with it, too'. Back in 2017, as we began planning this volume, we settled on the term 'harmscapes' to conceptualise the evolution of arrays of intersecting and interacting harms. Climate change is a primary exemplar (Berg and Shearing, 2018: 75): a globally coherent phenomenon that creates myriad diverse harms, manifesting in multiple and connected ways. Climate change harms play out at multiple spatial and temporal scales: spatially, harms range from localised to global scales, and temporally, some harms are immediate, others are delayed, and others again are, from any meaningful human perspective, effectively permanent.Climate change is a change process characterised by nonlinear dynamics and threshold effects: as such, impacts can cascade across sectors, and with limited predictability (Duit and Galaz, 2008). The impacts of climate change are dispersed, but uneven. And as with impacts, attribution of climate change,

show abstract

Section: Environmental Security Finance and Insurancementioning

confidence: 99%

Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities

Holley¹,

Phelan²,

Shearing³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In today's risk society (Beck 1992), the insurance industry has been recognised as imposing new 'templates of control' on crime Carriere 1994), and, as O'Malley (2017) has argued recently, insurance was just as relevant to the nineteenth century proposal by Jeremy Bentham to place a monetary value on harms and to focus 'criminal' justice on financial compensation. Others, such as Nel, Shearing and Reyers (2011), have also argued that insurance can positively shape societal behaviour, such as encouraging communities to actively manage and restore the ecological buffering capacity of landscapes, which can significantly reduce current and future risks associated with climate change (see also Herbstein et al 2013).…”

Section: Insurers As Shapers Of Climate Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Herbstein argues, with reference to underwriting, that organisations can be expected to fully exploit strategies with which they are familiar before exploring alternative approaches. For example, Herbstein identifies defensive underwriting, i.e., increasing premiums, tightening policy conditions and withdrawing cover, as a tried and tested approach that insurers will continue to employ prior to contemplating alternative approaches with which they have little or no prior experience (see also Herbstein et al 2013). With reference to investment, Herbstein identifies a number of constraints on insurers' capacity and willingness to divest from fossil fuel-intensive investments, as Leggett had proposed in 1992.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurance and climate change

Phelan¹,

Holley²,

Shearing³

et al. 2020

Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Louise du Toit'… risk will no longer grow as a linear function … Instead risks will multiply exponentially and with gathering speed … As far as the insurance industry is concerned, this development calls for immediate action' (Kaufmann 1990, no page number).'Underwriting climate destroying coal projects [in] this day and age exposes the climate rhetoric of most major insurance companies as hypocritical' (Bosshard 2017, 7).

show abstract

“…Our research has been pragmatic (and opportunistic), as the choice of projects undertaken have been shaped by access and funding opportunities. To date this work has involved projects that have engaged municipalities (see, for example, Froestad et al, 2012; Pasquini and Shearing, 2014), the insurance industry (see, for example, Herbstein et al, 2013; Nel et al, 2011), the marine industries and agriculture (Honig et al, forthcoming; Petersen et al, 2015). What has integrated these projects has been a set of cross-cutting analytic questions, that AMP references, focused on understanding the institutional conditions that shape human engagements with earth systems.…”

Section: Exploration In Environmental Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Criminology and the Anthropocene

Shearing

2015

Criminology & Criminal Justice

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article explores how criminology is responding to, and might respond to, the challenges presented by changes in earth systems, and the reasons for them, that the term 'Anthropocene' signals. It begins with a very brief review of these developments and the meaning of the term. It then examines the responses within criminology that have emerged under the sign 'green criminology'. Thereafter it explores how criminology might respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene by using a 'security governance' lens.A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. (Foucault, 1988: 155 cited in Dalby, 2007 All of this suggests quite clearly that we need to rethink our identities as agents of geological change, and in the process understand humanity's role in the larger order of things. (Dalby, 2007: 112)

show abstract

Insurance, Climate-Risk and the Barriers to Change

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities

Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities

Insurance and climate change

Criminology and the Anthropocene

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About