ABSTRACT
Insurance is commonly understood as a benign financial tool in the distribution and management of risk. The excess of insurability can be mobilized as a source of fear, to build dependence on and maintain enthusiasm for insurance. A capacity for location or alignment within insurer-defined notions of insurability can support adaptive and sustained lives, and it can also produce maladaptive and perverse outcomes. With insurability understood, in part, as manifest within excess, the prospects of insurability lie with ‘places within climates’ and not, per se, with how insurers respond and adapt to climate uncertainty. Contemporary insurance marketing continues to incite the senses, evoking feelings of fear, guilt, and hope, and ‘safety, belonging and respectability’. For example, contradicting government health initiatives in the United Kingdom, lower insurance premiums were awarded to those suffering ill health due to reduced life expectancy and the healthy were ‘punished’ for the likelihood of living longer.
