Thirteen years ago, on this day, August 5, 2010…
A group of academics who have been working with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) and the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) have called for diplomats attending the upcoming Bonn and Mexico climate talks and summit to take insurance into account.
A policy brief issued by the academic groups calls for insurance to play a key role in reducing climate change risks and influencing climate adaptation projects.
“Our research over the past years has shown that insurance solutions – with coordinated public-private action and some international support – has the potential to help vulnerable countries and people adapt to climate change”, stated Koko Warner (UNU-EHS), lead author of the policy brief ‘Solutions for Vulnerable Countries and People’. “Now it is time to move from knowledge to action. The need to link DRR and insurance and scaling them up is greater than ever to get the critical mass for adaptation”, Dr. Warner continued.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 388.7ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was the Copenhagen gathering had been a complete failure. And so academics thought that if they could geinsurance companies involved, then it might shake loose some of the intransigence. I don’t know if they knew it, but Greenpeace had tried the same shtick 15 years earlier at the first COP, in Berlin, with very limited success.
What I think we can learn from this is that people always think that there is a button that can be pushed, a lever that can be pulled, to get us out of this fix. But it probably would require Cthulhu pushing and pulling with all of its tentacles repeatedly to make the machine shift.
What happened next
The insurance companies put out some glossy reports and there was some hand-wringing and the carbon dioxide kept accumulating,
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.