A few months ago, I was standing on the sand at Horseshoe beach speaking with a university academic as a couple of hundred protesters launched a flotilla of kayaks and rafts into the shipping channel.
The researcher's work was focused, in part, on whether the insurance sector is properly equipped or even capable of dealing with the fallout of climate change. It struck me as an unusually practical and pragmatic approach to a problem that tends to divide people over how existential it can sometimes appear. It was the sort of jolt you might feel if you had just spent a few months chatting with a committee of architects about what, if anything, constitutes "a room" when, all of a sudden, a chippy comes around with a hammer and asks which bits need to be nailed together to keep the rain out.
