ABSTRACT
Climate change is fundamentally changing the ways we insure, and the ways we think about insurance. Most texts on insurance are located within the fields of economics and finance, focusing on key concepts and principles, legal frameworks, and technical explanations of the insurance industry. Quantitative methods dominate with an associated assumption of individual rational decision-making, and this has shaped insurance as a scientific object – a tool to be applied and a thing to be measured in its effectiveness (or lack thereof). In the social sciences such perspectives are being progressively critiqued, unsettled, and complicated. As well as being actuarial and financial, insurance is social and political, and constituted within the complexities of everyday life. As we show in this book, insurance is also elemental – it is co-constituted within the dynamic entwining of earth, water, air, fire, and, what we propose as a fifth element, ‘big’ data. Through the book we follow two narrative threads. One is ontological – we trace how insurance realities constitute and are constituted through these five elements. The other is epistemological – we loosely map these elements onto different spatialities: earth and Kantian space; air and forgotten space; water and fluid space, fire and fire space; and, ‘big’ data and spatial imaginaries.
