Leigh Johnson
Graduate Student
BA 2003 (Anthropology) Columbia University
Regional focus: American Southeast; European and Atlantic offshore financial hubs; the Arctic
My research is largely motivated by the conviction that geographers (and social scientists in general) have seriously underestimated the importance of property/casualty insurance as a precondition for so many of the geographical processes we study: global trade, global development, flows of finance capital, hazard mitigation, risk assessment, industrialization, real estate development, and so on. The forms that insurance and reinsurance take can also tell us much about a society's governance and its norms of sociability and responsibility.
My dissertation research concerns the development and integration of climatological knowledge, probabilistic catastrophe modeling, and weather-related financial instruments within the (re)insurance industries and capital markets. More broadly, the project examines the roles of science and scientists in the transformation of risk assessment and risk governance as financial markets face an increasingly uncertain future climate.
This provokes me to investigate the history of catastrophe models (especially for tropical cyclones), the institutional forums developed for knowledge transfer, the sorts of scientific and technical evidence required to price risk, the structures of property (re)insurance, the geography of insurance capital, the development of markets in weather and climate-related derivatives, the multiplication of uncertainty and vulnerability, and the logic of responsibility.
My applied research concerns insurance accessibility and vulnerability of low-income and minority neighborhoods in Southern Florida, a GIS project I am approaching using coastal flood, hurricane, and storm surge model output in combination with demographic and economic data.
I’m also broadly interested in the role of insurance in laying the groundwork for development projects and capital investment in the Global South, the recent growth of micro-insurance projects in the Global South, and alternative insurance practices around the world.
My past work has included: Shifting sovereignty, capital investment, and extractive regimes in the melting Arctic; wildfire in the southwestern Amazon - remote sensing, ground-truthing, and participatory community fire prevention; environmental and health indicators for monitoring infrastructure development projects through the southwestern Amazon.
Websites of interest
Resources of Interest
Real-time global tropical cyclone monitoring and seasonal predictions
Real Climate: Climate Science from Climate Scientists
Prometheus: Often controversial, always intriguing science Policy Blog at CU Boulder
Insurance Linked Securities industry newsletter
Alternative Risk Transfer blog and deal records
Arctic Research and News
Kerry Emanuel's take on Anthropogenic Effects on Tropical Cyclone Activity
Just for Fun:
The Breathing Earth
Calogero True-Shape Projection World Map
Singing Horses Guaranteed to make all your problems momentarily melt away!