As the impacts of the climate crisis unfurl around the world, is the UK government awake to the scale of the problem? Nine new reservoirs are in the pipeline to be built before 2050, while there are consultations on reducing demand for water. But this may be too little, too late; many housing developments are on pause because of water scarcity.
The first new reservoir planned for Abingdon in Oxfordshire is sited in the same place as the government's new datacentre zone, leading to fears the water will be used to cool servers rather than serve customers in one of the most water-stressed areas of the UK.
Green homes experts have said government building codes for new housing should include rainwater harvesting for internal use such as in lavatories and washing machines. People with gardens could use a water butt in summer, so that clean tap water is not being pumped through a hose into garden plants.

Consider the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting economic downturn from government-mandated business closures. While many firms would have loved to have business interruption insurance to cover their revenue losses, no private insurer could have paid claims to all of its clients simultaneously. The P&C industry in the United States estimated that just one month of business interruption losses from the pandemic was more than 10 times larger than the claims handled by the industry over an entire year, and that just two to three months of such losses exceeded the total industry surplus (the difference between assets and liabilities and net worth). Globally systemic risks are not insurable because they are too big. The prospect of numerous, very large natural disasters in the same year poses a similar problem.
Probability and correlation
Intuitively, it makes no sense to insure something that has a 100% probability—the premium from the customer would have to cover the entire cost of the loss (in addition to the insurer's cost of doing business), so there would be no economic benefit to risk transfer. But the upper limit of insurability tends to be far below 100%. Even risks at an annual probability of 10% or 5% are often not cost-effective to insure—the insurer has to pay so frequently that the required premium is very high—and the most commonly insured risks have an annual probability closer to 1%. For risks that are more frequent, it is usually more economical for asset owners to invest in risk reduction measures that make the loss less likely to occur, either by reducing exposure to the risk (e.g., moving away from areas with high wildfire risk) or by reducing vulnerability (e.g., strengthening assets to withstand wildfire).

Comment ne pas tirer les conséquences de la destruction des Palestinien·nes et du fanatisme d'Israël
À la douleur, l'horreur, l'impuissance, la colère que l'on éprouve en regardant se dérouler à distance, depuis vingt-et-un mois maintenant, le génocide des Palestinien·nes, il s'ajoute, pour celles et ceux qui vivent en Occident, un profond malaise. Ce malaise est dû au fait de vivre dans des pays qui ont toujours considéré Israël comme étant le bon, la victime – civilisé, éclairé, rationnel, humaniste, de bonne volonté, vulnérable –, et les Palestinien·nes comme les méchants – barbares, obscurantistes, menaçant·es, agressif·ves, haineux·ses, dangereux·ses…