Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that our next Research Seminar will be by Dr. Ian Gray, titled "Making Climate Knowledge Actionable: The Fraught Politics of Pricing Climate Risk in U.S. Homeowner Insurance Markets" on Wednesday, October 30, from 2pm - 3:30 pm in the Forum Room 301. The talk abstract and the speaker’s bio are below. We'd appreciate you joining us for this event
If joining on Zoom, please RSVP here. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list.
Abstract: Under climate change, how are social institutions adapting to the need to anticipate a continuously changing environment? Insurance provides a good site for observing such adaptations. After suffering heavy losses from a string of natural disasters in the early 1990s, the US (re)insurance sector embraced a new technology called catastrophe, or ‘cat’, models to solve pervasive underestimations of risk. The first cat models succeeded in crafting consensus about how future risks should be priced via insurance. But as extreme weather under climate change diverges from historical records, cat-modeling firms have struggled to integrate this new information into their forecasts. Initial attempts to upgrade models have generated contentious reactions from homeowners and regulators, casting doubt on modelers’ position as privileged arbiters of risk. This talk will demonstrate how efforts to make climate knowledge "actionable", i.e. incorporate such knowledge into economic decision-making, trigger broader political disputes about how these risks should be socially distributed. These findings bear implications for sociological understandings of the natural environment as a source of institutional change
Bio: Ian Gray is an environmental and economic sociologist. Presently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Columbia Climate School, he is currently writing a book on the transformation of climate science into an operational form of knowledge and the development of "adaptation" as a field of expertise. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Economy and Society, The Anthropocene Review, and Big Data and Society, among other venues.
