Winds of Change: Insurance, Climate Science and the Moral Economy of Risk at the IBHS Research Center

A growing literature has examined the trend in promoting insurance-based strategies for climate change adaptation through the lens of the biopolitics of risk. This essay contributes an examination of the dual functions of the Insurance Institute of Business and Home Safety’s (IBHS) Research Center as producer of both climate knowledge and political technologies for assigning responsibility. I argue that by enacting disaster in a delimited domestic realm, the IBHS uses the authority of science to advance a deeply individualised response to climate risk. A look at how knowledge is translated across scales from the individual policyholder to the global reinsurance market reveals the insurance industry to be a fruitful site of investigation of the politics of climate knowledge. In particular, I suggest that insurers operating at national and sub-national scales mediate conflicting attitudes towards climate change between the abstracted sphere of global climate science and the heterogeneity of public opinion. As a result, the IBHS develops a moral economy that connects scientific and political ways of knowing to create cultural norms for responding to risk. These are communicated through representational media and become part of a disciplinary attitude toward climate change that frames individual adaptation choices in terms of rationality and responsibility. These modes of anticipating the future overlook the diverse reasons why people choose not to buy into insurance-based adaptation avenues, which can result in exclusionary policies. For this reason, I encourage the consideration of solidaristic and collectivist ways of managing climate risk as alternatives to insurance.