Pricing terminal risk: the political economy of climate adaptation in five mini Earths

This note places a research programme on the public record with a date and an author. It asks how the property, insurance and credit markets of a small, low-elevation, high-income island price sea-level rise and storm risk, a long-run and possibly terminal physical risk, and ultimately the persistence of the island itself. Five such islands exist: the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Anguilla. The programme studies them as a class and compares them with a selected control basket of economies that have a hinterland and a backstop. It extends a completed Cayman Islands study on carbon stocks and conservation funding. The note states the research question and the framing. Hypotheses, methods and data will appear in the papers that follow. Keywords: climate adaptation; small island states; sea-level rise; terminal risk; insurance; property markets; sovereign credit; political economy; LESIS.