Insurance and the temporality of climate ethics: Accounting for climate change in US flood insurance

How is knowledge about future climate change operationalized in governance of the present? This paper addresses this question by examining efforts to repurpose US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for adaptation. Policymakers and officials initially imagined challenge be principally a technical one accounting uncertainty risk assessments insurance tools. But conduct outcome their reflected instead politically charged normative tensions related temporality ethics. NFIP policyholders, constituted as ‘risk public’ instruments flood insurance, exposed these mobilizations targeting practices governance. The case shows that ‘accounting for’ governing it through work out—in however tentative or provisional fashion—larger moralized disputes over distribution burdens, benefits responsibilities time.