Why are we “doing nothing” about climate change?

Most scholarship, and indeed public debate, explains rising CO2 and continued global warming as signs of inaction.

But the historical record reveals decades of climate actions undertaken by a wide variety of actors in the EU, who have approached climate change as a risk to be managed by measuring, predicting, and mitigating economic losses. Climate risk management emerged in the 1990s, when anthropogenic warming became a salient political issue, the European Commission asserted its “global moral authority” on climate change, and widespread financialization transformed the risk management tools originally developed for 18th century maritime commerce into a general approach across the economy.

Funded by the European Research Council (ERC 101303717), EURISK offers a paradigm shift by asking whether climate risk can be managed: is it possible to predict and control the economic consequences of unnatural disasters? The EURISK team will uncover how EU institutions and other international organizations; firms and business associations; insurers and reinsurers; national and European courts and alternative dispute mediators have attempted to manage climate risk in ways that have allowed economic priorities to take precedence over ecological imperatives, the consequences of which resemble inaction but importantly are not.

Together, we will offer a history of collective and contested climate risk management and thus a new explanation for the planetary present beyond inaction.