FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 3, 2014
Contact:
MATTHEW LEWIS
media@thenextgeneration.org
Twitter: @mateosfo
415-689-5745
Risky Business Climate Initiative Announces Partnership with RMS
World’s Leading Catastrophe Risk Modeling Firm to Provide Analytics, Expertise; Top Advisers to Hedge Fund, Insurance, Financial Industries
San Francisco, CA – The Risky Business initiative today announced a new partnership with Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world’s leading catastrophe risk management firm, to enhance the initiative’s ability to provide high-quality data on climate change risk to business leaders who face economic risks associated with a changing climate.
RMS joins the initiative as a content partner, and will work with lead initiative staff at Next Generation to provide robust analysis of the impacts climate change will likely have on coastal infrastructure and related assets. The results will be included in a major report on the economic risks of climate change in the United States, due in June 2014.
“Our intent from the outset of the Risky Business project has been to show our Risk Committee, and the wider business community, a range of probable economic risks the United States will face from climate change in the coming decades,” said Kate Gordon, executive director of Risky Business and vice president of the Energy and Climate Program at Next Generation. “By combining the expertise of RMS with the analysis we’re conducting for other sectors of the American economy, we’ll produce a best-in-class assessment that we believe will be valuable to a broad range of American businesses.”
“While there are uncertainties regarding the impact of climate change, the risks are real and can be quantified using today’s technology and computing power,” said Hemant Shah, co-founder and CEO of RMS. “Through a scientific approach, we can systematically address climate risk issues. By objectively measuring this risk, we can as a society manage it.”
Shah continued, “My colleagues and I are passionate about this issue, and are delighted to join the Risky Business team and apply our considerable expertise on hurricane and coastal flooding risk to this very important initiative.”
RMS employs more than 1,200 professionals, including multi-disciplinary scientists, modelers, and big compute technologists and engineers who analyze data, create models and develop software to enable key business sectors around the world to quantify risks and develop solutions to manage risk and increase resiliency.
For the Risky Business initiative, RMS modelers and scientists are using its market-leading stochastic hurricane and coastal flooding model. The RMS model simulates the likelihood and economic impacts of thousands of individual storms and coastal flooding events, at high-levels of resolution, across the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts of the United States. These models will be conditioned and run against a set of scenarios for future sea levels and patterns of hurricane activity, based upon peer-reviewed climate science on sea-level rise scenarios and expected changes in hurricane frequency and severity.
Launched in October 2013, Risky Business (www.riskybusiness.org) is a year-long effort to quantify and publicize the economic risks the United States faces from the impacts of a changing climate.
The Risky Business initiative includes two core components:
An independent assessment of the economic risk of climate change in the United States, drawing on the best available scientific information, econometric research and modeling efforts. The results, to be released in the summer of 2014, will detail risks by region of the country and sector of the economy.
An engagement effort focused on the communities most at risk from a changing climate, to begin the process of helping leaders from these communities prepare a measured response to the risks they face. The engagement will be led by a risk committee composed of top national and regional leaders from across the American economic and political spectrum.
Risky Business is a joint initiative of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Office of Hank Paulson, and Next Generation. All three organizations are providing staff input to the project, and are supporting an independent economic analysis that will quantify the range of likely costs of climate-driven impacts and weather disasters. Additional support for Risky Business was provided by the Skoll Global Threats Fund.
###
About Next Generation
Next Generation promotes solutions to two of the biggest challenges confronting the next generation of Americans: The risk of dangerous climate change, and the threat of diminished prospects for children and families. Through the use of non-partisan research, policy development, and strategic communications, we identify strategies that help deploy clean, advanced energy technologies; we also work to ensure a level playing field from which today’s kids can build a brighter future.
Learn more at www.thenextgeneration.org , www.facebook.com/thenextgeneration.org and on Twitter @nextgen_USA.
About RMS
RMS technology enables the world to have a more complete view of catastrophic risk.
RMS is transforming the insurance industry’s understanding and quantification of risk with RMS(one)™, the industry’s only exposure and risk management platform.
More than 400 insurers, reinsurers, trading companies and other financial institutions trust RMS models, analytics and metrics as reliable benchmarks for strategic risk pricing, management and transfer.
Founded at Stanford University, RMS is celebrating 25 years of innovation in catastrophe risk management this year. Learn more at www.rms.com and follow us on Twitter @RMS.