In property insurance claims triage, insurers often use static information to assess the severity of a claim and to identify the subsequent actions. We hypothesize that the pattern of weather conditions throughout the course of a loss event is predictive of the insured losses, and hence appropriate use of weather dynamics improves the operation of insurers’ claim management. To test this hypothesis, we propose a deep learning method to incorporate dynamic weather information in the predictive modeling of the insured losses for reported claims. The proposed method features a hierarchical network architecture to address the challenges in claims triage due to the nature of weather dynamics. In the empirical analysis, we examine a portfolio of hail damage property insurance claims obtained from a major U.S. insurance carrier. When supplemented by dynamic weather information, the deep learning method exhibits substantial improvement in the hold-out predictive performance. We further design a cost-conscious decision strategy for triaging claims using the probabilistic forecasts of the insurance claim amounts. We show that leveraging weather dynamics in claims triage leads to a reduction of up to 9% and 6% in operational costs compared to when the triaging decision is based on forecasts without any weather information and with only static weather information, respectively. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self-fashion themselves as more-than-human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other-than-humans? How do right-wing supremacists’ assertions that theirs is an indigenous more-than-human politics that suffered but endured the violence of colonialism support the framing of fascism as a decolonizing project? In this article, we ground these questions in an ethnographic analysis of what we call the more-than-human turn in contemporary Hindu-supremacist politics in the northwestern Himalayan region, focusing specifically on two political projects: the Hindu right-wing's rediscovery of “ancient” Hindu rivers and communities in Ladakh and cow protection in Uttarakhand. In contrast to ontological anthropologists who suggest that cosmopolitics is plural and liberatory, we demonstrate how the inclusion of nonhuman entities in political life can serve to naturalize a fascist politics that seeks the extermination of those who are not part of the natural order of life. We urge anthropologists to make room for skepticism and critique in their analysis of cosmopolitical formations instead of prematurely celebrating “ecopolitics” as anti-Western and anticolonial.