Jathan Sadowski awarded $1.1M ARC Future Fellowship to tackle climate insurance crisis
ETLab's Associate Director of the Future of Fire, Insurance and Realestate industries (F.I.R.E) , Dr Jathan Sadowski has been awarded $1.1M from the ARC Future fellowship fund. His research will investigate how climate change is disrupting access to insurance for Australians.
The ARC Future Fellowship scheme recognises Australia’s most outstanding mid-career researchers undertaking projects of national importance. Dr Sadowski’s fellowship is one of 13 awarded to Monash researchers in this funding round – the highest number received by any single university in Australia.
His new project, titled ‘Crisis, Insurance, and the Techno-Politics of Climate Risk Governance’, will examine how increasingly severe climate disasters are pushing insurance out of reach for many households, and how current systems of risk management are struggling to respond.
‘This is both an economic and a governance crisis,’ said Dr Sadowski. ‘As climate impacts escalate, a growing number of Australians can no longer afford essential forms of protection, like home and flood insurance.’
‘We need to understand who is making decisions about risk, how those decisions are shaped, and what kinds of futures they’re creating.’
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, Dr Sadowski will combine ethnographic fieldwork with technical analysis to study how reinsurance markets operate, how risk data is produced and interpreted, and how vulnerable communities are affected on the ground.
He aims to build a new evidence base to inform theories of how risk is governed through technology, finance and policy. The project’s principal goal is to help guide more equitable responses to climate-related threats and support the development of policies that strengthen national resilience and climate justice.
‘Dr Sadowski’s project is an outstanding example of his commitment to tackling one of Monash’s challenges of the age – climate change,’ said Senior Deputy Dean (Strategy & Operations) Professor John Grundy.
‘His timely research will provide deep insights into the socio-technical systems that shape climate vulnerability and resilience, and we are very proud to support his leadership and ground-breaking research in this critical area.’
Dr Sadowski is a Senior Lecturer in Monash’s Emerging Technologies Research Lab and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
An internationally recognised voice on the politics of technology, he is the author of two influential books: ‘Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World’ and ‘The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism’.
He also co-hosts the podcast ‘This Machine Kills’, which explores the intersections of technology, capitalism and power.
Dr Sadowski previously held an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for his research into the political economy of insurtech and actuarial governance.
This ARC Future Fellowship positions Dr Sadowski to shape national conversations on climate adaptation, risk governance, and equitable policy responses in an era of accelerating environmental uncertainty.