If cities most exposed to climate risk are least able to finance adaptation, and private capital is pricing that risk, who bears the cost, who is protected, and how are decisions made?
Urban climate adaptation has a political economy problem. The communities most exposed to climate risk in informal settlements, in coastal flood zones, in urban heat islands, are precisely the communities with the least political and financial power to demand protection. The decisions involved in adaptation are not primarily technical. They are profoundly political: who gets a seawall and who gets a managed retreat; who bears the cost of infrastructure; whose property values are protected and whose are not. Conventional adaptation planning depoliticises these decisions by treating them as technical risk management problems and in doing so, systematically serves the interests of those who already have power.
This lab examines urban climate adaptation through a political economy lens drawing on examples from insurance sector to show how the insurance sector's repricing of climate risk is creating both urgency and opportunity for urban resilience investment. It then asks the harder question: how do we design the financial and governance architecture of adaptation to ensure that repricing drives protection rather than abandonment of the most vulnerable?
