The Journal, CII
February 19, 2025
https://thejournal.cii.co.uk/features/2025/02/19/california-wildfires-metaphor-insurance-dystopia
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My blog for the Chartered Insurance Institute Journal.
“Virtually any city on Earth can burn now – probably not Dubai, but just about any place that has a lot of hydrocarbons. Berlin could burn, New York could burn, Pittsburgh can burn. LA is burning”: John Vaillant – author of ‘Fire Weather’ – tells Kiley Bense in Inside Climate News of January 16, 2025.
Southern California is a perfect blend of ‘unholy’ trinity – ignition, oxygen and fuel. Growing developer greed, setting aside Indigenous wisdom and invasive plant species that came with the colonisers – together with intensifying climate change ensure the deadly outcome.
“What climate change does is it takes naturally occurring phenomena and makes them more intense and more erratic, and also creates conditions for them to occur in places they didn’t normally occur. We all know Southern California is flammable. It’s part of the rhythm of this landscape”: explains Vaillant.
Given that these events are going to happen more and more often… should we be surprised? Lots to learn for markets wishing to scale insurance penetration in fragile landscapes.
Hong Kong SAR
February 25 to 27, 2025
Illuminem – first published by Sanctuary Nature Foundation
February 12, 2025
https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/naive-risk-management-at-best-and-fatally-foolish-at-worst
Sanctuary Asia
Feb-Mar, 2025
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My Op-Ed for February 2025 issue of Sanctuary Asia.
With a bull on rampage – the strain of a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 currently spreading among dairy cows in the US – seems to be getting overlooked. It is reportedly one mutation away to readily latch on to human cells found in the upper airway. If and when that happens, will it be consigned as yet another black swan? As of now the ‘pandemic segment’ is monetization in progress.
Climate models are falling behind reality. New research reveals more extreme and unexpected climate changes than models predict. The gap between models and reality is widening. Science is clear – the climate is changing faster than we are prepared for.
The proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda provides one way to navigate this under-studied area. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is “naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
Zaneta is a Biodiversity and Climate Risk Lawyer qualified in England and Wales with a strong focus on risks and opportunities climate and biodiversity crises present to the financial system as well as individual decision-makers.
She helps clients understand and mitigate their exposure to biodiversity and climate liability risks, prepare for the regulatory changes anticipated in the decarbonisation of the worldwide economy and implement their own Net Zero targets in a responsible and transparent manner. Most importantly, as Zaneta puts it, she helps clients turn these risks into opportunities for their business and wider stakeholders.
Praveen Gupta: While Climate breakdown, Biodiversity loss and Pollution together constitute the biggest existential threat – how do you believe should these be addressed?
Zaneta Sedilekova: There is no single solution to the triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. We know that they are driven by our dominant economic system and therefore can only be addressed through system-wide change. Systems change happens at multiple levels of individual behaviour, collective culture, government and corporate decision-making, among others. Law has its own role to play in enabling and solidifying such systems change through interpretation of existing principles and progressive regulation for new markets.
PG: You have mentioned Climate change as a friend and as a direction of travel. Would you please explain?
ZS: My point here is to reframe how we communicate about climate change. The current narratives are largely fear- or shame-based. We either talk about climate change as a threat to address, a problem to solve, or even, in some cases, a danger to fight. These narratives create fear among everyone who dares to listen. Fear completely inhibits us from imagining our shared future.
“Very much like fear, shame is paralysing and more often than not leads to denial or backlash”
The second narrative is based on shame – we shame people for their life or work choices, their lifestyles. While I appreciate lifestyle prevalent in some countries is heavily contributing to climate change, shaming people for adopting such lifestyle is not going to help. Very much like fear, shame is paralysing and more often than not leads to denial or backlash. We need to change the narrative about climate change to bring everyone on board. This is where reframing may help.
Climate change is a natural process, driven by the Earth’s systems, irrespective of its consequences for us, as a species. When we communicate it through negative emotions, such as fear or shame, we necessarily attach a judgment to otherwise neutral natural phenomenon. If we decide to speak about climate change more neutrally, such as ‘a friend’ or a ‘direction of travel’, our response completely changes. We stop fighting it and start looking in the direction in which it is pointing.
That direction of travel is very clear – decentralised renewable energy sources, restoration of natural ecosystems that help restore balance in the atmosphere, shorter supply chains and nature-centric decision-making across all levels of the society – government, corporate and individual. If we remove fear and shame from our narrative about climate change and instead approach it with neutrality, our future becomes visible and attainable for us all.
“If we remove fear and shame from our narrative about climate change and instead approach it with neutrality, our future becomes visible and attainable for us all”
PG: Of late you have been drawing much of your inspiration from Eastern traditions/ philosophies? How does that help?
ZS: As any professional working in this area, I spend my days reading the narratives of fear and shame I describe above. Many of them present a grim or even a doomsday picture of our common future. It is not easy to stay positive, or indeed find joy in everyday life without strong mental resilience. I find that my daily yoga, breathing and meditation practice helps me see the bigger picture, stay focused on my priorities, both in my personal and professional life, while making sure that I can make difficult decisions with integrity and responsibility on a daily basis.
It was more of a happenstance than my deliberation to turn to Eastern traditions, yet for the past ten years, I have been diving deeper and deeper into them to find balance and peace in the world that is becoming more and more uncertain.
PG: Many thanks Zaneta for sharing these brilliant insights into your chosen path to cope with our biggest existential crisis. With all good wishes.
February 9, 2025
The two stories are just that. Here is the originator, best selling author Michele Wucker, explaining the phrase:
What is a Gray Rhino?
“The Gray Rhino is a metaphor for the threats that we can see and acknowledge yet do nothing about: the two ton thing that should be hard to ignore, but from which we look away even though it’s in our interest to get away before it charges. It may be pawing the ground, snorting, and getting ready to charge at you; or it may still be a ways up the road when you still have time to manage things before they become urgent.
I created it for talking about big policy issues, like debt crisis and financial fragilities, climate change, and inequality. Along that vein, it’s struck a chord during the Covid-19 pandemic as so many of us ask why so many warnings went ignored. But it’s also useful for business issues, whether outdated business processes and systemic decision-making failures, industry trends, or product safety issues.
The gray rhino counters two familiar metaphors. The elephant in the room normalizes saying and doing nothing. That’s not okay. The black swan gives people a “nobody could have seen it coming” cop-out excuse for ignoring gray rhino problems that many people did see coming and warned about.
The Gray Rhino Framework
The Gray Rhino metaphor and framework is a way to get people to acknowledge and counteract our vulnerability to obvious, dynamic risks not just despite but because they are so obvious. There are five stages, each of which has different obstacles and strategic imperatives that shape your response:
- Denial. Insistence that there is no threat.
- Muddling. Acknowledgement of the risk but come up with a litany of reasons not to do anything about it.
- Diagnosis. A switch to the active planning stage, analyzing what it takes to solve the problem and getting our ducks in a row.
- Panic. Frenzied anxiety in face of an imminent crisis; the time when we’re most likely to act but also most likely to make the wrong decision absent a strong action plan.
- Action. Taking steps – often led by positive mavericks – to avert the problem, inspiring others to join in the action, tracking the results, and adjusting as needed.”
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January 16, 2025
My turn for the autograph: Picture courtesy Bittu Sahgal
Amitav Ghosh’s conversation with Raghu Karnad turned out to be more than an ‘evening of wild fictions’. To many who are not old enough and haven’t followed the master’s craft from his early days – Wild Fictions Essays marks a convenient entry point. For someone like me, who started following him since his ‘campus notes’ days at the Delhi University – from the ‘Emergency’ era – this was about gathering the nuggets from the tweens. Whether between academics or the long list of books, while Ghosh metamorphosed as a great author.
“The pieces in this collection are about a wide variety of subjects, yet there is one thread that runs through most of them: of bearing witness to a rupture in time, of chronicling the passing of an era that began 300 years ago, in the eighteenth century” – writes Ghosh in the introduction.
“This was, of course, the period that saw the birth of modernity and industrial civilization, in which, under the leadership of the British empire, the west tightened its grip over most of the world, culminating ultimately in the emergence of the US as the planet’s sole superpower. Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ‘unipolar moment’ peaked at the turn of the millennium and then ran into a series of profound shocks that began in 2001.”
The book commences with six chapters on Climate Change and Environment, a cause Ghosh champions passionately and deservedly stays atop his list of priorities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse he narrates the extractive exploits of the European coloniser. The resulting terraforming has had significant climate implications for the planet. However, today the ways of life of much of humanity is extractive – we have all become colonisers of nature – pushing ourselves towards irreversible tipping points.
Despite the hubris, the Homo sapiens is at a crossroad. Howsoever compelling geopolitics may appear, are we missing signals of a sixth extinction – as the decibels rise?
“High modernity taught us that the Earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes. In this time of angels, we are slowly begining to understand that in order to hear the Earth, we must first learn to love it”.
Are we ready to accept this stark truth – as Ghosh concludes?
Illuminem
January 15, 2025
Delighted to be in the august company of some exceptional #Climate champions. illuminem makes this possible in its uniquely pathbreaking style.
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The Journal, Chartered Insurance Institute
January 10, 2025
The Journal link: https://thejournal.cii.co.uk/2025/01/10/climate-change-amocalypse-now
LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7284041803975061504/
My Op-Ed for The Journal – Chartered Insurance Institute – highlights the potential impact of an impaired Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (#AMOC). And why insurers, as well as other money pipelines must act.
The critical role of oceans in climate regulation tends to be undermined. #Anthropogenic onslaught is driving this “great global ocean conveyor belt” towards a #tipping point.
Unhindered fossil fuel burning and relentless deforestation are resulting into skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as rapid Arctic and Greenland ice melting. That is adversely transforming ocean water chemistry and dynamics.
Climate scientists believe that a substantial weakening of AMOC might result in significant, possibly catastrophic, climate breakdown. Oceanographer and climatologist Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf has been closely following the developments and regularly shares valuable alerts.
Study by Dr. Susanne Ditlevsen and Dr. Peter Ditlevsen “confirms the huge concerns about a possible collapse of one of the major tipping points in the climate”.
That could literally leave parts of the planet frozen and much of the rest boiling.
Also published by Illuminem
December 23, 2024
https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/pfas-pervasive-and-insurance-averse
The Diversity Blog 