Session 4: Actuaries Climate Index 2.0: Improving Geographic Coverage and Extremes Tracking

Thank you

This live web event has ended. Thank you for attending.

Description

[PART OF THE 2024 CAS CLIMATE RISK VIRTUAL SEMINAR]

This presentation will discuss the North American Actuaries Climate Index – both the current version of the index, referred to as “ACI 1.1”, and an improved version, referred to as “ACI 2.0”, which is presently under development.

Alp, Steve, and Patrick are members of the working group tasked with the development of ACI 2.0. They will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ACI 1.1, the motivations for developing version 2.0, and the ideas and concepts that are presently being examined and tested as part of the ACI 2.0 development process. The presentation will cover the following ACI 2.0 development considerations:

• Possible data sources: station data, gridded interpolated data, gridded reanalysis data;
• Data elements (weather and sea-level variables);
• Metrics for summarizing local-level weather (with emphasis on weather extremes);
• Options for aggregating local metrics across both space and time;
• Aggregation across elements;
• Options for displaying results.

Learning Objectives:

Understand main weather data types: station data (e.g. GHCN), gridded interpolated data (e.g. GHCNDEX), and gridded reanalysis data (e.g. ERA5).
Test weather time-series data for long-term trends.
Capture weather extremes in a manner that is statistically significant.

Contributors

Alp Can

Alp Can worked in the U.S. Property and Casualty insurance industry in various actuarial roles for over twenty years. He is currently a program pricing actuary at USI Insurance Services. He has been involved in the development, dissemination, and promotion of the Actuaries Climate Index from its early stages. As the current chair of the group that produces this index, he leads the effort to create the next generation of the index that aims to improve on its data sources and its construct. He is a member of the International Actuarial Association’s (IAA) Climate Risk Task Force, serving to help this body produce a series of papers aimed at familiarizing actuaries with climate change risk, the current approaches to managing it, and the contributions actuaries can make to its management in a professional capacity. He is also a member of the IAA’s International Standard of Actuarial Practice No. 8 (ISAP 8) Task Force, where he serves to promulgate a model standard that gives guidance to actuarial work related to IFRS S2 (Climate-related Disclosures) of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation. He recently co-authored an article on the relevance of the P&C actuary in facing the challenges of climate change.

Alp is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries, and a Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics.
Steve Jackson

Steve Jackson, Ph.D. is the director of research (public policy) at the American Academy of Actuaries. He works with all five of the Academy’s practice councils (health, life, property & casualty, retirement, and risk management) to generate, develop, and execute research projects that will enhance the work of the councils. As part of that work, he has been the primary Academy staff member working on the technical development of the Actuaries Climate Index and was the principal author of the Preliminary Findings of the Actuaries Climate Risk Index. Prior to his work at the Academy, Jackson was a member of the faculty at Cornell University and at Washington University in St. Louis.
Patrick Wiese

Patrick is an actuary (ASA) in the Society of Actuaries Research Institute where he builds models and database tabulation/visualization tools covering a diverse range of areas including retirement security, climate change analysis, and mortality improvement.

Patrick is a member of the research team that developed the Actuaries Climate Index, an online tool for monitoring long-run trends in the frequency of severe weather in North America. In addition, Patrick is a co-author of the SOA’s “Actuarial Weather Extremes” reports which provide statistical summaries of recent extreme weather events.

Prior to joining the SOA in 2012, Patrick developed long-range forecasting models of social security and retirement systems in low and middle-income countries, for projects funded by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

Thank you

Description

Contributors

Alp Can

Steve Jackson

Patrick Wiese