Loss and adaptation on a warming planet

Leon Wansleben
“O ruined piece of nature! This great world shall so wear out to naught,” exclaims Gloucester upon recognizing King Lear’s madness, after the king’s own daughters have withdrawn from him all kingly privileges. In Shakespeare’s famous drama, the fate of the planet and that of his characters are inextrica­bly linked. With the king’s expul­sion by his children, a thunder storm arrives. And when charac­ters speak of ruined nature, as Gloucester does, they imply that the social as well as biologi­cal-physical order are out of joint.

My first question is about the scholarly foundations of your work, the methodological as well as theoretical strands that have been influential.
It all started with some frustration when I was an undergraduate studying economics. I thought that some of the models that were presented to me sounded really abstract. So if I wanted to do modeling, then better do some thermodynamics. And so I felt – and this is also discussed in the work of economic historian Philip Mirowski – that economists were somehow fascinated by physicists, but that didn’t allow them so much to look at what was actually happening in the real social world and how to integrate climate into the economic system.

Savannah Cox
On an unseasonably hot afternoon in June 2019, I made my way to downtown Miami, Florida, for a meeting with the Director of the city’s Office of Capital Improvements. This individual had only recently joined the ranks of city government after decades of working as an engineer in the US military. Despite the shift in employer, this official viewed his work as fundamentally the same. As he told me, he was still involved in combat, but the adversary he now faced in his work was neither human nor a nation state. Instead, the adversary was climate change, and it was his task to protect the city from it. The only way to do so, he said, was through massive investments in climate adaptive infrastructure.

David, you have been professor for weather and cli­mate risk at ETH Zurich since 2016. Before that, you worked at Swiss Re, the large reinsurer, for 16 years. Can you tell us a bit about this previous work outside academia?
I joined Swiss Re from MIT, partly because at the time Swiss Re was interested in hiring scientists with expertise in climate science and policy. The first seven or eight years I held positions in natural catastrophe risk management. The goal was to devise models for the company to price risks or single deals. But a reinsurer can also use the same models to allocate capital, and over time more and more of my interest shifted to that.

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