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Insurance and the temporality of climate ethics: accounting for climate change in US flood insurance

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  • Elliott, Rebecca

Abstract

How is knowledge about future climate change operationalized in governance of the present? This paper addresses this question by examining efforts to repurpose the US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for climate change adaptation. Policymakers and officials initially imagined the challenge to be principally a technical one of accounting for uncertainty in risk assessments and insurance tools. But the conduct and outcome of their efforts reflected instead politically charged normative tensions related to the temporality of climate ethics. NFIP policyholders, constituted as a ‘risk public’ by the instruments of flood insurance, exposed these tensions in mobilizations targeting practices of risk governance. The case shows that practices of ‘accounting for’ climate change and governing it through insurance work out—in however tentative or provisional a fashion—larger moralized disputes over the distribution of burdens, benefits and responsibilities over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Elliott, Rebecca, 2021. "Insurance and the temporality of climate ethics: accounting for climate change in US flood insurance," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 107925, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:107925
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    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107925/
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    flood insurance; climate change; risk; maps; ethics; temporality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance
    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

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