• Energy Research

This chapter uses a desktop study to examine the insurance industry’s potential as a ‘fulcrum institution’ that can influence others to prevent and address environmental harms from climate change. As this chapter demonstrates, given insurance’s central economic role, the relationship between insurers and climate change is complicated and conflicted. After the discussion of insurers as shapers of climate risk (the first section of the chapter), this chapter explains how (in the second section) insurers are strongly implicated in creating climate change and attendant climate risk in the period since industrialisation through facilitating the accelerating fossil-fuel-based economic development and growth that causes climate change; this is the dominant dimension in insurers’ relationship with climate change. In the third section of this chapter, the authors review insurers’ responses over the past decade to increasing climate risk. Responses have been largely adaptive and aimed at increasing insurers’ capacity to accommodate the climate risks faced by their policyholders. Some responses have been ‘weakly mitigative’, meaning that they provide for some mitigation, but on a very limited scale, and largely as side effects of initiatives unrelated to climate change. In marked contrast, a very limited number of recent ‘divest and decline’ actions by insurance industry actors can be described as ‘strongly mitigative’, as described in the fourth section. The fifth section concludes the chapter with some remarks on the prospects for further strong mitigation action from insurers on climate change and their role as governors of security beyond the state.

Working with South Africa’s largest short-term insurer, Santam, we investigated how communities should manage the increased risks associated with climate change. The global insurance industry has focused on refining the quantification, differentiation and pricing of the risk exposure of insured assets. Our findings call into question a sole reliance on this strategy (J. Nel et al. CSIR/NRE/ ECOS/2011/0063/B; CSIR, 2011).

Abstract Inclusive energy access remains elusive globally. Centrally planned energy infrastructures tend to neglect marginalised and disparate populations while upfront costs make it rare for lower-income actors to adopt off-grid renewable energy. This article identifies one emerging response by low-income actors to secure access to through solar photovoltaic energy and an innovative micro-finance enterprise. The AMP framework (awareness, motivation and pathways) is used to explore how and why Tanzanian youths are adopting solar photovoltaic energy and with what effects. Qualitative interviews and field observations indicate awareness and motivational factors of technology, cost, warranty and service influence initial adoption decisions. Nodes of off-grid renewable energy associate with co-benefits of poverty reduction, low-carbon energy access and diversification away from livelihoods that are highly vulnerable to climate change. Framed as a ‘pathway’, the innovative financing mechanism in this case presents an inclusive model of energy access. These findings extend the AMP framework to include consideration of obstacles within the notion of pathways. The case highlights a potential model for energy access and emerging nodes of decentralised and distributed energy modalities, that are potentially more climate resilient, as low-income actors seek to secure access.

This article analyzes the implications of the Anthropocene for the governance of security. Drawing on environmental law, green criminology, and international relations, the article examines the development of environmental security scholarship over recent decades and shows similarities and differences in perspectives across the three disciplines. It demonstrates that the Anthropocene represents a significant challenge for thinking about and responding to security and the environment. It argues a rethinking is needed, and this can benefit from reaching across the disciplinary divide in three key areas that have become a shared focus of attention and debate regarding security in the Anthropocene. These are, first, examining the implications of the Anthropocene for our understanding of the environment and security; second, addressing and resolving contests between environmental securities; and third, developing new governance responses that mix polycentric and state-backed regulation to bring safety and security to the planet.