It is likely that the most vulnerable are least likely to be insured, or be able to pay an extortionate premium to be covered. Much like how private health insurers in the US refuse to insure those at high risk of cancer, the investors in catbonds are less likely to be able to provide coverage for those least developed countries most at risk of climate chaos, such as Bangladesh. Indeed, there are certain to be “uninsurable” regions, just as there are millions of Americans without health coverage. Rather than modelling climate insurance on a Scandinavian or Canadian socialised system, ensuring that everyone is equally covered, the catbond market replicates the broken healthcare system of the USA with its storied injustices. Here, due to increased premiums paid to already wealthy northern investors by southern governments least able to pay, there is a transfer of wealth not from north to south, but from south to north – a situation Swedish scholars have described as “particularly odious”.
pjt111 taylor on 26 Nov 18"Current debates about the integration of traditional and academic ecological knowledge (TEK and AEK) struggle with a dilemma of division and assimilation. On the one hand, the emphasis on differences between traditional and academic perspectives has been criticized as creating an artificial divide that brands TEK as "non-scientific" and contributes to its marginalization. On the other hand, there has been increased concern about inadequate assimilation of Indigenous and other traditional perspectives into scientific practices that disregards the holistic nature and values of TEK. The aim of this article is to develop a practice-based account of the epistemic relations between TEK and AEK that avoids both horns of the dilemma. While relations between TEK and AEK are often described in terms of the "holistic" nature of the former and the "mechanistic" character of the latter, we argue that a simple holism-mechanism divide misrepresents the epistemic resources of both TEK and AEK. Based on the literature on mechanistic explanations in philosophy of science, we argue that holders of TEK are perfectly capable of identifying mechanisms that underlie ecological phenomena while AEK often relies on non-mechanistic strategies of dealing with ecological complexity. Instead of generic characterizations of knowledge systems as either mechanistic or holistic, we propose to approach epistemic relations between knowledge systems by analyzing their (partly mechanistic and partly holistic) heuristics in practice."
