This book takes a critical look at the idea of collapse, focusing on the relationship between accelerating climate risks and insurance. Insurance is a weathervane for the social impacts of unmitigated global environmental change, and it is pointing to rough times ahead: unstoppable rises in the cost-of-living and growing inequity and inequality, amidst intensifying extreme weather events. This book provides an authoritative and accessible investigation into the social and geographic dimensions of insurance in a changing world, to challenge notions of collapse and ‘the end of the world’ that are fatalistic and blind to inequality and inequity. It presents a new way of understanding collapse, and how to live well, in a changing world. The author argues that we must find language and ideas to accurately describe the current global trajectory and its uneven, unjust impacts. She explains that without critical understandings of notions like collapse, we will remain bereft of meaningful action and achievable goals. 

Kate Booth is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is a human geographer and activist academic, and her research and teaching address socio-ecological inequity in the context of rapid and unprecedented global change.