In the last decade a growing number of efforts have been made to insure the weather-related production risks of rural agricultural households in the Global South via microinsurance contracts linked to environmental indices. Such index insurance products are increasingly championed for their ostensible capacity to decrease vulnerability, 'crowd in' rural credit, and increase productive risk taking. This paper presents an empirical and theoretical framework for understanding the explosion of these projects, demonstrating that the formation of financial consumer subjects who are themselves agricultural producers is an emerging and consequential process within the dynamics of (dis)articulation. Rather than being hindered by the absence of the real subsumption of land or labor to capital, the derivative nature of the index insurance form-offering only the possibility of remuneration instead of indemnification of loss-makes it especially well suited to operating in precisely such conditions on the edges of (non)market relations.

This editorial provides an analytical intervention to accompany the theme issue’s empirical papers on “Rethinking the Financialization of Nature.” The papers turn our attention towards three often neglected themes in prior research on finance and nature: (1) the frictional processes through which money leverages nature and resource-based ventures to produce more money (“Getting between M-C-M’”); (2) the role played by moralities, values, and affect in the financialization of nature and resistance levelled against it; and (3) the multiple roles of the state in mediating the circulation of finance in and through nature. We also engage with the politics of information and legitimation accompanying the financialization of nature to tease out levers for political critique. Finally, we map out a forward-looking agenda calling for research to engage more substantially with both the methodological questions accompanying the study of the financialization of nature, and the class dimensions of the process.

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Abstract. This paper investigates the scales and temporalities through which climate change impacts may be rendered into socio-ecological fixes for crises of overaccumulation within the (re)insurance industry. The property insurance and catastrophe reinsurance sectors are notorious for their cyclicity, with prices and returns oscillating dramatically between "soft" and "hard" markets. The problem of overaccummulation in soft market periods is often resolved by the destruction of reinsurers' capital reserves through huge catastrophic losses. This is typically followed by the revision of catastrophe models and reestimation of exposed values, processes which absorb additional (re)insurance capital and provide technoscientific legitimacy for raising rates. Reframing climate change risk in terms of ecologically-sourced devaluation suggests that, rather than posing an immediate existential threat, in the short to medium term the uncertain impacts of global climate change might constitute a recurrent "catastrophic fix" for particular segments of financial capital. This highlights both the productivity of uncertainty about climate change impacts and the limits of presuming that the operations of the private insurance market can produce a built environment more adapted to climate change. Rather, the more likely outcome is splintering protectionism: a patchwork of high risk, high reward areas where insurance is available only to those with the ability to pay rising premiums, leaving the state to manage the retreat and relocation of less remunerative properties and populations.

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