Why America Needs A New Kind Of Forecasting

Main Category: Aid / Disasters
Also Included In: Conferences;  IT / Internet / E-mail;  Public Health
Article Date: 21 Oct 2008 - 8:00 PDT

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In an era of intense fluctuation in weather and climate patterns, the cost and availability of insurance are increasingly urgent issues - as the recent $46 billion insured losses from Hurricane Katrina and the $10 billion estimated damage from Hurricane Ike highlight.

In order to continue providing coverage that is widespread and affordable, commercial insurance companies and their governmental counterparts need dramatically improved methods of reducing uncertainty and anticipating financial risk, especially in storm-prone locations. Fortunately, advances in climate science are now reaching the point at which they can begin to fill many of those needs and to factor the requirements of end users into priorities for future research.

Find out how innovations in climate science can affect this crucial component of the nation's economy at a special briefing on October 31. Experts from the insurance industry, the federal government and academe will discuss a strategy for devising new forecast models and describe their potential impact on insurance in both the public and private sectors.

Speakers:

• Richard L. Thomas, Senior Vice President and Chief Underwriting Officer - Domestic General Insurance, AIG
  
  
• Antonio J. Busalacchi, Director, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park.
  
  
• Chester J. Koblinsky, Director, Climate Program Office, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
  
  
• Howard Kunreuther, Co-Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
  
  
• Steve Halperin, Dean, College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park

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Notes:

Report from the Wharton School's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center on Managing Large Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes. This report, to be published by MIT Press, focuses on the role that insurance coupled with other policy tools can play in reducing losses from future hurricanes and other natural disasters. The report is available here.

The CIRUN web site: http://www.climateneeds.umd.edu/

The GAO Report on Climate and Insurance (http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-07-760T): "Many large private insurers are incorporating both near and longer-term elements of climatic change into their risk management practices. On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, the federal insurance programs have done little to develop the kind of information needed to understand the programs' long-term exposure to climate change."

The GAO Report on Federal Land Management (GAO-07-863): "[R]esource managers do not have sufficient site-specific information to plan for and manage the effects of climate change on the federal resources they manage. In particular, the managers lack computational models for local projections of expected changes and detailed inventories and monitoring systems for an adequate baseline understanding of existing local species. Without such information, managers are limited to reacting to already-observed climate change effects on their units, which makes it difficult to plan for future changes."

The 2007 National Research Council report on the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10635):

"…[P]rogress in synthesizing research results or supporting decision making and risk management has been inadequate. …Although the temperature trends assessment (CCSP, 2006b) was influential in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 19 other CCSP synthesis and assessment products scheduled to be released by now are still in the production stage. Also, only a few small programs (e.g., Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program, Decision Making Under Uncertainty centers) have been initiated to identify and engage decision makers.

"Progress in understanding and predicting climate change has improved more at global, continental, and ocean basin scales than at regional and local scales. Information at regional and local scales is most relevant for state and local resource managers and policy makers, as well as for the general population, but progress on these smaller spatial scales has been inadequate.

"Improving understanding of regional-scale climate processes and their impacts in North America, for example, would require improved integrated modeling, regional-scale observations, and the development of scenarios of climate change and impacts.

"Our understanding of the impact of climate changes on human well-being and vulnerabilities is much less developed than our understanding of the natural climate system. Progress in human dimensions research has lagged progress in natural climate science, and the two fields have not yet been integrated in a way that would allow the potential societal impacts of climate change and management responses to be addressed. This disparity in progress likely reflects the inability of the CCSP to support a consistent and cogent research agenda as recommended in previous studies."

Source: Mary Kearney
University of Maryland

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