Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the shifting role of fire insurance given the increasing intensity of wildfires due to our current climate crisis. Looking to fire insurance, we argue, presents a unique opportunity to understand value, governance, and perceptions of risk as socially and legally constructed.

Presentation long abstract

Record wildfire seasons have captured international headlines from Canada to Australia, and Spain to Turkey. While the localized impacts of wildfires are unique geographically, wildfire’s intensifying impacts are global. Alterations in weather patterns and ecosystems due to climate change combined with a century of fire suppression tactics that were normalized during settler colonial and urbanizing processes have been attributed as key drivers to the increasing intensity and severity of wildfires. Within this context, Global North countries have naturalized property and fire insurance as the financial mechanism to hedge risk in locations where fire and property meet (i.e. at the wildland-urban interface), presenting unique opportunities to consider value, governance, and risk as socially and legally constructed. As such, who can (and cannot) stay and/or rebuild post-fire is increasingly determined by insurance coverage – or a lack thereof. Insurance itself, however, is deeply entangled with socio-legal and political geographies including access to property that have long operated along power geometries engrained within social contexts. In this paper, I will consider what the shifting role of fire insurance suggests given our current climate crisis, including the increased intensity of wildfires. By weaving together theoretical texts and recent studies on the state of insurance due to increasing impacts of wildfire, I will begin to lay the foundation for further research into political ecology, wildfires, and insurance that will ask: What can (climate) justice perspectives applied to fire insurance reveal about the colonial legacies of insurance?