What makes something insurable — and what happens when the risks change?This week on Shaken Not Burned, Felicia talks to Rachel Delhaise, group head of sustainability at Convex Insurance, about how insurers deal with a changing and uncertain climate.

As climate risks grow, insurance can become more expensive or harder to find. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the risk has simply become uninsurable. Better climate science and modelling can change how risk is understood and priced; resilience can reduce potential losses; and new financial structures can change how risk and cost are shared.

Rachel explains why insurers want to insure, how insurance can act as a signal that underlying risks need to be addressed, and how insurers can use their investment capital to help build resilience, creating what she calls a cycle of insurability.

Climate change is altering the hazards we face, but it doesn't determine everything that happens when they hit. Where and how we build, what we protect and where we invest can change the outcome.

And underwriting and investment aren't the only ways insurers can contribute. They can also support the science that helps us understand what is changing and what we might do about it. Convex, for example, funds the Convex Seascape Survey, a five-year global research programme investigating the huge but poorly understood store of carbon in seabed sediments — including what happens when those sediments are disturbed and whether protecting them could help keep that carbon locked away. We previously spoke to the programme's lead scientist Callum Roberts about what they're discovering and why it matters. Listen to that conversation here

This is the third episode in our arc on the changing economics of risk. In the first, our conversation with Dr Robert Johnston explored how risk can build through decisions that make sense individually but add up to something much more damaging — and why failing to recognise the full cost doesn't make it disappear. Last week, Regula Hess of WWF joined us to look at what happens when that risk becomes loss, the insurance protection gap, and who pays when insurance covers only part of the bill.

Next, Felicia and Giulia bring the conversations together to ask what they tell us about where risk comes from, who ultimately pays for it, and what we can do to change the outcome.

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