Climate change and insurance are subject of new research position at Imperial

Imperial College London has been awarded €1 million to study how climate change could affect the insurance industry.

The new position of Chair in Biosphere and Climate Impacts has been awarded by the AXA Research Fund, a world-wide initiative of scientific philanthropy supported by the global insurance group AXA.

Professor Iain Colin Prentice will take up the position in the Department of Life Sciences and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change. He will deliver a public lecture entitled "State of ignorance: climate change and the biosphere" today, Monday 24 June.

Professor Prentice has been involved in research into living things and their environment for over 20 years. He was responsible for informing governments on the relationship between CO2 emissions and concentrations, and the processes of CO2 uptake by the oceans and land, in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report.

Professor Prentice will speak about the importance of understanding how climate change could make a difference to ecosystems, communities of living organisms and the non-living parts of their environment.

Why are an insurance firm interested in funding ecosystem science?

Professor Colin Prentice (CP): The AXA Research Fund aims to help academics share their discoveries to better inform public debate, as well as inform AXA’s own knowledge of the risks society face.

For insurers, better understanding of the impacts of climate change on society is crucial to help them to protect their clients.

What kind of impact do you think climate change could have in this area?

CP: Some of the potential major impacts of climate change are related to the land biosphere and the carbon cycle (movement of carbon between the land, atmosphere and oceans). We can expect to see risks to agriculture and forests if floods or droughts become more frequent.

Crop failure due to drought is just one of the many impacts we may face in the future. The risk of wildfires could also increase as inland areas become hotter and drier. There could be potential extinctions if habitats change and species cannot migrate.

Climate models often don’t include biological processes that influence these changes and instead just focus on the physical and chemical processes, such as the water cycle. Including biological processes, like the breakdown of organic matter in the soil, will help us to better understand the climate’s longer-term dynamics and prepare for the expected risks.

How will your findings be used by AXA?

CP: AXA wants to be able to anticipate environmental risks and mitigate their consequences, in order to support their clients in preparing for potential threats. Research such as this allows them to do this better.

The research will forecast consequences for land ecosystems. This will cover risks and opportunities for forestry, arable crops and bioenergy production as well as potential changes in the carbon, water and nutrient cycles that underpin life on earth.

We hope to quantify these risks and identify ways that agriculture can adapt to climate change.

Will ordinary people see a difference?

CP: Insurance premiums won’t necessarily go up or down. But the work will help improve the services that AXA provide to their clients.

More widely, there will be societal benefits from the improved understanding of the risks and opportunities from climate variability and change, how we can adapt and how we might better manage ecosystems and biodiversity

What are scientists doing about these concerns?

CP: Scientists are already working on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the forthcoming IPCC fifth assessment report, which will contain the most up to date details of our current knowledge of climate change.

The research I plan to do should lead to significant advances in our understanding of how climate interacts with the biosphere and provide robust projections of the risks we will all face from climate change.

Professor Colin Prentice has written a Grantham Discussion Paper on the topic of ‘Ecosystem science for a changing world’ which is also published today, Monday 24 June.

In the paper Professor Prentice discusses some of the potential impacts of climate change on the ecosystem that are still poorly understood.

This includes the widely varying estimates of the extent to which species will go extinct due to climate change. Professor Prentice argues that the ability of most species to adapt naturally to climate change may have been underestimated.

He concludes by suggesting new ways forward to help improve our understanding of the impacts by combining models with observations from satellites and the geological record.

Download the discussion paper here: Ecosystem science for a changing world