Shaken Not Burned

Insurance is supposed to protect us from risk. But what happens when the risks themselves are changing? Risk doesn't disappear because we fail to recognise or price it. Decisions that make sense individually — pumping more groundwater during a drought, building another housing development, keeping water prices low — can accumulate until environmental change becomes economic loss. Insurance is one of the places where that loss becomes visible. Insurers pay some of the bill; the rest falls on h...

What makes something insurable — and what happens when the risks change?This week on Shaken Not Burned, Felicia talks to Rachel Delhaise, group head of sustainability at Convex Insurance, about how insurers deal with a changing and uncertain climate. As climate risks grow, insurance can become more expensive or harder to find. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the risk has simply become uninsurable. Better climate science and modelling can change how risk is understood and priced; resilience ...

When disaster strikes, insurance may pay some of the bill. But who pays the rest? This week on Shaken Not Burned, Felicia Jackson talks to Regula Hess, deputy head of WWF Switzerland, about the growing insurance protection gap — and why it matters far beyond the insurance industry. When losses aren't insured, they don't disappear. They fall on households, businesses and governments, affecting everything from mortgages and investment to public finances and the speed at which communities recove...

We rely on water for pretty much everything: growing food, manufacturing goods, building cities and sustaining everyday life. But what happens when the systems we've built around it start to reach their limits? Felicia Jackson talks to economist Dr Robert Johnston, director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University, about why he sees today's water challenge as a systems failure — and how individually sensible decisions can combine into what he calls a catastrophic harmony. We ...

As extreme heat and wildfires sweep across Europe, the gap between recognising climate risk and responding to it is becoming harder to ignore. The good news is that the evidence, expertise and many of the solutions we need already exist. Why, then, is meaningful action still so difficult? That was the question at the centre of this special live edition of Shaken Not Burned, recorded at SOAS during London Climate Action Week. Felicia was joined by Julia Davies (We Have The Power and Patriotic ...