Mediating and mapping climate risk: micro-insurance and earth observation

The recent trajectory of micro-insurance in Africa lies at the intersection of two trends that have been percolating unevenly over the past decades: (1) the incorporation of micro-insurance into the practices of FinTech; and (2) the reframing of micro-insurance as a technology relevant to the management of ‘climate risk.’ I focus on digital experiments in the construction of platforms which access data from remote sensing ‘earth observation’ technologies to formulate unique indices of climate risk. These platforms mediate the antinomies of presence/absence, place/distance; they operate ‘remotely’ from the risks they constitute and map while claiming an intimate and ‘hyper-local’ index of those risks. These mediations manage the distance between ‘the ground’ and the ‘remote’ sites from which knowledge of particular locations is produced, constituting new forms of territory and volume. I argue that these platforms entail unique uncertainties of their own: the ongoing problems of basis risk; costs imposed on vulnerable populations often unable to afford premiums; and issues of climate injustice in which responsibility is placed on poor populations to manage climate risks they had little role in creating in the first place.