When I was a young American studies major in college, I became fixated on the role of the flaneur in literature. These characters—think of the narrator in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—are particularly tied to urban fiction; they wander the vibrant streets not actively participating but simply observing their surroundings, absorbing information and impressions.
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The protagonist in Pippa Goldschmidt’s story “The Way Out” is a new kind of literary character that we’re likely to see more of as the climate keeps warming: the disaster flaneur. Drover is a data analyst who studies the slight variations in bat heart rate, flight patterns, and other somatic and behavioral factors in order to better predict oncoming storms. The bats of Edinburgh have taken over former apartment blocks and coastal manors, abandoned due to increasingly frequent storm surges that have flooded the city and displaced its people. Drover, with his computer data and bat trackers, observes it all from a house on a hill, constructing a narrative of the city’s destruction that he tells only to his disembodied boss, Toring, and his live-in girlfriend, Quine.
Like many flaneurs before him, Drover eventually gets a little more involved in what he observes; he sees on his monitors that a bat has died, and he ventures out of the safety of his hilltop home to find it on the real streets. There, he encounters both the epitome of the faceless state—a hazmat-suited figure sent out by the city to collect the bat—and its opposite, an affectionate feral dog who Drover eventually takes home. No other humans seem to be about in the apocalyptic cityscape that Edinburgh—now called “New Reekie,” an allusion to the longstanding nickname Auld Reekie, which affectionately mocked the city’s smoggy Industrial-Era ambience—has become.
As our own world becomes warmer and catastrophic weather events become more frequent and severe, it’s easy to imagine worlds like the one Drover observes from his hilly refuge. While in the United States we still respond to disaster mostly through cleanup and rebuilding efforts, as in the recent Los Angeles fires, we’re slowly starting also to talk about “managed retreat”—proactively moving houses or whole communities away from areas that will likely see repeated flooding or fires, or heat so extreme humans cannot realistically spend time outdoors. These retreats are a regular occurrence in Drover’s world, with residents carrying “only a rucksack” shuttled out of their homes and onto waiting buses, never to return.
Our flaneur status may be coming to an end.
These kinds of major population shifts have to date mostly happened in the Global South, not in the northern climes of either the United States or Scotland. Indeed, richer northern countries like ours have largely been observers to the darkest realities of climate impacts. But our flaneur status may be coming to an end: In 2024 alone, the United States experienced 27 climate-related disasters that each had a price tag of at least $1 billion. Observing from a distance is also easier when a robust insurance system protects those fortunate enough to own property from the worst economic impacts of climate disasters. House flooded or burned to the ground? Insurance companies will pay for you to build another one on its footprint, as happened after wildfires in the Oakland hills near where I live, or farther north in Paradise, California, or in flood zones across the Southeast—provided homeowners have procured the right kind of coverage, which is increasingly difficult as disasters multiply.
As recently as a decade ago, many people in developed economies like the United States and Europe thought insurance would continue covering most disasters, whether through the private insurance system or through government-funded programs such as the Federal Flood Insurance Program or California’s FAIR Plan. Back when I and others created the Risky Business Project, one of the first analyses of the economic impact of climate change on specific US regions and industry sectors, we believed it was the reinsurance sector that would see the brunt of the costs of climate change. Reinsurers exist to take on the risk of major catastrophic losses that front-line insurers would not otherwise be able to pay without going bankrupt; they pool these risks across global markets in exchange for premium payments from insurance companies. In essence, they are the insurers of the insurance market. Insurance companies, with their ability to adjust coverage on an annual basis and easily move away from the riskiest markets, seemed like they would be protected from the worst climate losses.
It turns out we were wrong—or rather, that the risks from climate change were far more frequent and widespread than we originally projected. The past two years have been full of stories of insurers retreating from major markets, including the states of California and Florida. As public insurance plans step in to try and fill these gaps, they face enormous fiscal strain, leading financial experts to worry about municipal bankruptcy stemming from increasing disaster-related costs. Climate disasters can create a kind of fiscal doom loop, raising government costs for cleanup, unemployment insurance, rent and food support, and other strands of the social safety net, while depressing property values and in turn, tax receipts.
Observing from a distance is easier when a robust insurance system protects those fortunate enough to own property from the worst economic impacts of climate disasters.
Insurance is so important to the climate story because it’s the main way our economy interacts with short-term disaster and long-term risk. Fundamentally, managing climate impacts—impacts that are now baked into our system due to 150 years of carbon-intensive industrial activity—is an exercise in risk analysis. Insurance companies are making a series of bets about what catastrophic events will play out, where, and on what timescale. Those insurers still making money today are spreading their risk across multiple geographies, so that no single event will wipe them out, and they can continue to make some money when an event fails to materialize. They’re making bets on catastrophic events—but because these events are now happening everywhere all at once, they’re starting to lose.
In Drover’s Edinburgh, the insurance industry has apparently abandoned the city, and the doom loop is well underway. Some blend of public- and private-sector money seems to pay Drover’s salary, but it’s not clear where the funds come from—possibly through taxes on residents, or some international financial assistance for Scotland, or the few private-sector players successfully gaming the system. We can see in the story that the weather data generated by Drover and his bats is of great potential value to private enterprise: Quine works for a shadowy financial company that is capitalizing on the new climate reality through a product that allows homeowners who can’t access insurance to bet directly on the probability of catastrophic events, getting a payout if they guess right, and giving the financial firm the payout when they guess wrong. As Quine points out when Drover questions the morality of this system, “A lot of people can’t even buy insurance, at any price. If their house has been flooded already there’s no way they can get it insured again. So we’ve set up this product that allows them simply to bet on the probability of there being a certain type of weather event with certain characteristics in a certain time period.… If the weather event happens and we pay out—and we do pay out, with no quarrels or quibbles—at least they get some money to help deal with the consequences.” Quine, unbeknownst to her employer, is secretly using Drover’s data to make her own private, fraudulent bets; she’s making out like a bandit playing this disaster roulette, spending her time buying silk scarves and engineered just-like-wild salmon while Drover toils away at his low-paid public service job and all around them, residents of lower-lying apartments file onto buses and are taken away from the floods.
It turns out we were wrong—or rather, that the risks from climate change were far more frequent and widespread than we originally projected.
Is this scenario really so futuristic? I’d argue that some version of it is happening already. While insurance companies, which are regulated by state governments, are starting to back out of many markets, there is still plenty of catastrophe arbitrage happening around the world. Look at the oil and gas companies betting on ice melt to open up new shipping lanes in the Arctic, or hedge funds playing the futures market based on carbon prices or water availability, or even the increasing popularity of catastrophe bonds, which allow insurers to transfer the risk of events to investors who then get a payout if the disaster doesn’t happen. These financial markets thrive while those who are already the most vulnerable, with the fewest options, bear the brunt of each successive disaster. The difference between what’s happening today and what Quine describes is simply that in her scenario, those most vulnerable to disaster are also those allowed to bet on it. In effect, Quine’s product takes the rarefied disaster markets of today’s financial sector and applies the logic of newly legal sports-betting apps like FanDuel and DraftKings, or consumer-grade stock trading apps like Robinhood, making gambling on disasters accessible to the general public. But there is still a middleman taking their cut—Quine’s own financial firm—and I assume that only those who still have the means to play in the markets are set to profit from it.
Drover, who is struggling with post-traumatic stress from a past storm and is functionally agoraphobic, has serious qualms about the ways that others are profiting off the catastrophic events he watches unfold on his screen, day in and day out. He chides Quine for the new betting system, comparing it to “dancing on graves,” and feels similarly anguished about the “catastrophe tourism” happening through boat tours of ruined parts of the city. He worries that information, his stock-in-trade, will always be coupled to profit motive, and wonders whether it can ever be “pure.”
In portraying data-driven Drover as the white hat and money-driven Quine as the villain, Goldschmidt’s story might overlook a fundamental tendency of humans in crisis—something that’s become increasingly clear over my 20 years working on climate issues. Like other animals, humans gravitate toward survival, including adapting to current conditions and finding ways to be resilient in the face of long-term change. It’s true that our economic system prioritizes making money from current conditions, which includes betting on the worst outcomes. But it also has the potential to rise above those conditions. Each year of disaster brings new innovations in wildfire monitoring, desalination, regenerative agriculture, reforestation—all born of necessity, and all moving toward a more resilient future.
They’re making bets on catastrophic events—but because these events are now happening everywhere all at once, they’re starting to lose.
Humans tend to band together in times of stress, finding fellowship and shared strength through community. Wildfire and flood events bring heartbreaking stories of loss, but also—always—inspiring stories of empathy and human connection, as Rebecca Solnit documents in her book A Paradise Built in Hell. Ironically, Scotland itself is a bastion of community-mindedness, with an enviable “community council” system organized by the national government to foster community empowerment across the country. I can’t imagine that culture breaking down in New Reekie just because of a few big storms.
It’s tempting to view climate change, with its steady march of disasters and disrupted social systems, from a critical distance: to take on the role of disaster flaneur, viewing the impacts through our computer screens until the moment it happens to us. But the reality is that across the world we will need to be right there in the fray, standing shoulder to shoulder, and marshaling all our creativity to find new technologies, systems, and financial structures that adapt to the world as it is now—not the world we are increasingly leaving behind. Like Drover at the end of “The Way Out,” standing with his new pet in the wreckage of a flooded apartment on the coast, we need to move beyond our yearning for a past, pre-disaster life, and instead seek connections and renewed purpose in a world that is changing fast—whether we’re prepared for it or not.
