Risk Analytics Symposium: Actuarial Perspectives on Climate Change

By RAS Organizing Committee

Expanding Horizons, June 2022

On March 25, 2022, the Actuarial Science Club at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign (UIUC), alongside the Illinois Risk Lab, hosted its fourth annual Spring Symposium. This event aims to inform attendees about emerging trends within the actuarial world and bring together experienced business leaders and academic researchers to share their expert insights. The theme of this year’s symposium was Actuarial Perspectives on Climate Change, a continuation of last year’s symposium, which explored solving emerging risks across the insurance industry using innovative methods, including InsureTech, AI and data analytics. However, contrary to last year, this year’s symposium delved deeper into the risk of climate change, a very relevant topic in the industry, as stronger and more frequent natural disasters caused by global warming have already generated great physical and financial losses for families and businesses.

The Risks Analytics Symposium 2022: Actuarial Perspectives on Climate Change was a hybrid half-day event where university students, as well as academics and industry professionals, had the opportunity to network and view live discussion panels in-person at UIUC or virtually through Zoom.

The event took place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and consisted of two panels moderated by Ryan Sriver, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois. During the morning session, Raghuveer Vinukollu, senior vice president for Climate Resilience and Solutions at MunichRe, and Bessie Schwarz, CEO and cofounder of Cloud to Street, discussed mitigating climate risk using satellite imagery from an industry perspective. During the afternoon session, James Jones, executive director of the Katie School of Insurance and Risk Management at Illinois State University, and Kaiyu Guan, professor in ecohydrology and remote sensing at the University of Illinois, discussed the effects of climate change on crop insurance from an academic perspective.

The members of the organizing committee were as follows:

Naomi Logan (Actuarial Science Club Workshops chair, University of Illinois)
Drew Taylor (Actuarial Science Club president, University of Illinois)
Andrea Wilcox (Actuarial Science Club vice president, University of Illinois)
Henry Wu (Actuarial Science Club vice president, University of Illinois)
Anika Chakraborti (Actuarial Science Club Workshops committee member, University of Illinois)
Pooja Khatri (Actuarial Science Club Workshops committee member, University of Illinois)
Sam Jourdan (Actuarial Science Club Workshops committee member, University of Illinois)
Zhiyu (Frank) Quan (Illinois Risk Lab, University of Illinois)
Runhuan Feng (Illinois Risk Lab, University of Illinois)

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.

Zhiyu (Frank) Quan, Ph.D., is an assistant professor and faculty advisor at the Illinois Risk Lab, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Frank can be reached at zquan@illinois.edu.