Securitizing the Risks of Climate Change. Institutional Innovations in the Insurance of Catastrophic Risks

The present vulnerability of regions, communities and activities, to changes in the frequency, intensity and distribution of extreme meteorological conditions presents a problem that may be complicated by climate change. Society has many different ways of responding to catastrophic risks and distributing the financial losses. This paper contrasts different approaches on grounds of efficiency and equity. The main focus is on securitization: a new mechanism for spreading risks that is of interest to insurance companies to assure the supply of adequate financial capacity, and also to governments as the insurers of last resort. The 1997 flood in Poland that amounted to a cost of 3% of GDP is analyzed, and securitization is proposed as a possible alternative to traditional insurance for ex ante coverage of the risk

Carbon Ruins: Engaging with Post-Fossil Transitions through Participatory World-Building

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative “Carbon Ruins—An Exhibition of the Fossil Era” (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently

Violent Climate Imaginaries: Science-Fiction-Politics

There are many ways in which climate futures can be envisioned, such as global and regional climate models, scenarios of future emission trajectories, or pathways and visions of societal transformation. All these anticipatory practices aim to make the climatic future knowable in the present. In so doing, they quite often envision a climatic future that is inherently violent: a future marked by disasters, wars, mass migration, turmoil, and terror. This working paper seeks to explain the popularity and tenacity of such violent imaginaries of (future) climate change in scientific research, popular culture, and political discourse. For this, it asks two interrelated questions: First, how do violent imaginaries of future climate change come about? Second, why and how do these imaginaries circulate and proliferate? To answer these questions, the paper provides a discussion of the concept of “violence” and elaborates how different forms of it are featured in imaginaries of future climate change. On this basis, the paper then traces three different modes of future-making that together produce and reproduce violent climate imaginaries: modeling the future, writing the future, and visualizing the future. Finally, the paper proposes and discusses several factors that could help explaining the circulation of violent climate imaginaries between the fields of science, fiction, and politics. These factors include the existence of an interdiscourse that bridges different specialized discourses, the broader political economy of imaginaries, interpersonal relations between actors in different fields, and the coproduction of dominant imaginaries with broader technological developments

Planning for 1000 Years: The Råängen Experiment

While traditional forms of urban planning are oriented towards the future, the recent turn towards experimental and challenge-led urban developments is characterized by an overarching presentism. We explore in this article how an experimental approach to urban planning can consider the long-term through setting-up ‘conversations with a future situation.’ In doing so, we draw on a unique experiment: Råängen, a piece of farmland in Lund (Sweden) owned by the Cathedral. The plot is part of Brunnshög, a large urban development program envisioned to accommodate homes, workspaces, and world-class research centers in the coming decades. We trace how Lund Cathedral became an unusual developer involved in ‘planning for thousand years,’ deployed a set of art commissions to allow reflections about values, belief, time, faith, and became committed to play a central role in the development process. The art interventions staged conversations with involved actors as well as publics geographically and temporally far away. The Råängen case illustrates how long-term futures can be fruitfully brought to the present through multiple means of imagination. A key insight for urban planning is how techniques of financial discounting and municipal zoning plans could be complemented with trust in reflective conversations in which questions are prioritized over answers

Violent Climate Imaginaries: Science-Fiction-Politics

There are many ways in which climate futures can be envisioned, such as global and regional climate models, scenarios of future emission trajectories, or pathways and visions of societal transformation. All these anticipatory practices aim to make the climatic future knowable in the present. In so doing, they quite often envision a climatic future that is inherently violent: a future marked by disasters, wars, mass migration, turmoil, and terror. This working paper seeks to explain the popularity and tenacity of such violent imaginaries of (future) climate change in scientific research, popular culture, and political discourse. For this, it asks two interrelated questions: First, how do violent imaginaries of future climate change come about? Second, why and how do these imaginaries circulate and proliferate? To answer these questions, the paper provides a discussion of the concept of “violence” and elaborates how different forms of it are featured in imaginaries of future climate change. On this basis, the paper then traces three different modes of future-making that together produce and reproduce violent climate imaginaries: modeling the future, writing the future, and visualizing the future. Finally, the paper proposes and discusses several factors that could help explaining the circulation of violent climate imaginaries between the fields of science, fiction, and politics. These factors include the existence of an interdiscourse that bridges different specialized discourses, the broader political economy of imaginaries, interpersonal relations between actors in different fields, and the coproduction of dominant imaginaries with broader technological developments

The Greenhouse Gas Emission from Portland Cement Concrete Pavement Construction in China.

This study proposes an inventory analysis method to evaluate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Portland cement concrete pavement construction, based on a case project in the west of China. The concrete pavement construction process was divided into three phases, namely raw material production, concrete manufacture and pavement onsite construction. The GHG emissions of the three phases are analyzed by a life cycle inventory method. The CO₂e is used to indicate the GHG emissions. The results show that for 1 km Portland cement concrete pavement construction, the total CO₂e is 8215.31 tons. Based on the evaluation results, the CO₂e of the raw material production phase is 7617.27 tons, accounting for 92.7% of the total GHG emissions; the CO₂e of the concrete manufacture phase is 598,033.10 kg, accounting for 7.2% of the total GHG emissions. Lastly, the CO₂e of the pavement onsite construction phase is 8396.59 kg, accounting for only 0.1% of the total GHG emissions. The main greenhouse gas is CO₂ in each phase, which accounts for more than 98% of total emissions. N₂O and CH₄ emissions are relatively insignificant

Metodología para la evaluación de la sostenibilidad en autopistas: cálculo del balance energético de la infraestructura.

El trabajo aborda el desarrollo de un procedimiento para la evaluación de la eficiencia energética en infraestructuras lineales desde el punto de vista constructivo. El procedimiento permite calcular, tanto globalmente como de forma independizada, el balance energético de las diferentes fases del ciclo de vida de la infraestructura: construcción, operación y desmantelamiento o deconstrucción