Adapting to climate change can’t be left to the wild west of the markets - Opinion

Climate change will represent a major challenge for finance and insurance according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth report. To bridge the gap in public finances caused by recurrent extreme weather events, it recommends appealing to private investors. And this, according to the opinion piece of Razmig Keucheyan published in the Guardian, is not a good idea. He argues that adding financial instability that is caused by volatile markets to environmental instability will only increase the scale of disasters and he recommends instead a more environmental long-term planning. Another argument Keucheyan lists against involving private finance in climate change adaptation is that finance is "undemocratic":

"Adaptation to climate change, however, will require the involvement of the people, the deepening of the democratic process, and even the invention of new democratic institutions. Without their active commitment, their knowledge and know-how, it is doomed to fail. The reason for this is that adaptation will in a good part be a matter of reorganising the daily lives of the people, and that this will obviously not be done without them. Adaptation to climate change, from this perspective, may well be our chance to revitalise democracy “from below”," Keucheyan writes.

Razmig Keucheyan is an assistant professor in sociology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the author of The Left Hemisphere