“Managing extreme financial, environmental and security risks lies at the heart of ensuring the resilience of our institutions, markets and society. Resilience provides the foundation for confidence, investment, and sustainable growth. These common challenges unify public, private and academic sectors with a unique opportunity for shared alignment and collaboration,” said Rowan Douglas, Chief Executive Officer of Global Analytics at Willis and Chairman of the Willis Research Network.

“Meanwhile, society relies upon the unifying concept of insurance, underpinned by science, to manage and share the cost of extreme events at local and global scales via public and private mechanisms; it is the ultimate community product,” he added. This year has been notable for the high human and financial costs of disasters in many parts of the world. It has already witnessed a spate of natural disasters including the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March.

The Arab Spring has seen the overthrow of regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and most recently Libya, where former leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed last month.

The ongoing financial crisis has continued to rumble on with the sovereign debt crisis in Europe threatening to engulf the region and bring down the Euro.

Plans for the summit began last year when leaders of the National Academy of Sciences and Willis recognised that governments, businesses, universities and societies need to work together to better anticipate and cope with such events.

“In this age of globalisation and interdependence of markets, it has become clear that no one sector of society is able on its own to best anticipate and respond to extreme events,” said Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We need to leverage our resources and work collaboratively, which is why we are pleased to partner with Willis Research Network in an effort to bring together different sectors to share knowledge and find common ground, with the overall goal of improving our understanding of extreme events and effectiveness in confronting them,” he added.

Willis’ Mr Douglas added that to solve some of these issues it is crucial to bring leaders of science, government, reinsurance and other sectors together to combine practical expertise and resources.

Participants at the September summit identified and discussed six primary elements of managing extreme events.

These included improved communication and education around extreme events, building public-private-academic partnerships for managing such events and the ability to share and provide access to relevant information.

They also discussed how to align exposure, risk, premium and subsidy more closely in disaster insurance programmes and how to develop an economic model to evaluate resilience to extreme events.

Also present at the event, which was also sponsored by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, US Geological Survey, National Center for Atmospheric Research and Environmental Systems Research Institute, was John Holdren, assistant to President Obama for Science and Technology and Director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Other notable attendees were Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary for Oceans and Commerce at the US Department of Commerce, Marci McNutt, Director of the US Geological Survey and Craig Fugate, Administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the US.

Representing the insurance industry was Louis Gritzo, Vice President of Research at FM Global, Andrew Hitchcox, Chief Risk Officer at RJ Kiln Group, Jamie France, Loss Mitigation Manager at State Farm Insurance and Stephen Weinstein, General Counsel at RennaissanceRe.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a private, nonprofit society of scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research. It is dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the public good.

An Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, calls upon the academy to provide independent advice to the US government on matters related to science and technology.

The Willis Research Network is a collaboration between science and the finance and insurance sectors. Through its partnerships with more than 50 of the world’s leading universities and research institutions in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America, it delivers solutions to corporate sustainability and financial resilience.

Through the network Willis participates in a number of global public-private partnerships dedicated to informing public policy decisions and devising shared solutions that respond to the mounting challenges posed by extreme events.

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