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CHAPTER 7
Big Data, Open Data and the Climate
Risk Market
Jo Bates
As the deep structural “uncertainties” that are beginning to define the early
twenty-first century continue to unfold (Hay and Payne 2013), the ques-
tion of how societies should respond to the decline—and the consequences
of—the era of carbon capitalism become increasingly pressing. For some,
the answer to these challenges is found in a further defining trend of the
contemporary era—advances in digital information and communication
technologies such as big data analytics, smart cities and social media
communications. In this chapter, we critically examine some key devel-
opments at one site where three phenomena related to these trends—
climate change, big data and financial capitalism—intersect: data-driven
climate risk markets. Situating these developments in the context of
emergent forms of “informational power” (Braman 2006) and data policy
struggles that aim to make meterological data more readily exploitable by
climate market actors, the chapter asks what it might mean to turn to
climatic uncertainty as a source of profit and growth.
J. Bates (&)
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
e-mail: jo.bates@sheffield.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2017 83
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_7
