Insurance in a changing climate: from commonsense to catastrophe

Insurance is frequently touted as a key mechanism for responding to climate change and its application is treated as 'commonsense'. This surety regarding the role of insurance forms part of a hegemonic global insurantial imaginary – how we collectively make sense of insurance through perceptions and behaviours premised on insurantial logics and market-based economics. In this paper, we identify an emerging and fractured insurantial imaginary that unsettles and disrupts such logics and surety. We make three contributions to insurance research which can be applied to other climate-related mechanisms in economic and financial geographical research. One: we critique the mobilisation of scale in insurance research and present an alternative spatialised methodology suited to addressing dynamic, multifarious notions like imaginaries. Two: in foregrounding spatial dimensions, we extend insurance theorisations by describing an emergent insurantial imaginary that is internally contradictory and fractured. Three: we discuss how this imaginary constitutes a radical political re-configuration. It speaks to an unravelling or 'collapse' of insurance with significant implications for societies constituted through risk and within which insurance, in its hegemonic form, is basal to how we respond, individually and collectively, to climate change.