Plot

This short documentary suggests climate change is above all a risk management problem that society is failing to face up to. The filmmaker calls up a list of insurance companies to try to buy personal insurance against climate change.

Offering a slice of his own reality the film shows Kevin holed up in his apartment worrying about climate change: about the floods, heat waves and mosquitoes he's heard about. He picks up the phone to get help from people who know about risks. After ringing around a slew of insurance companies he gets little satisfaction. It turns out that there are policies that will cover alien abduction but no insurance against climate change. The punchline - that there are no policies that are adequate to cover climate change - can be taken in a couple of ways. This funny, clever piece is a nicely weighted satire on society's unprepared state. But it also helps to nudge us towards thinking of climate change being not so much about acting on facts as acting on the basis of risk assessment. Indeed climate change can be understood as the greatest collective risk management problem of all time.—Dr Joe Smith