INTER-ACTION - 'Defining how we can act together to manage insurable risk'

The UK is impacted by a variety of natural hazards such as flooding and strong winds; Storm Desmond in early December 2015 is a recent illustration of this. Regulation (e.g. building codes), government response (e.g. the COBRA emergency committee) and various agencies (e.g. Environment Agency) seek to mitigate the effects and manage efforts to respond, but with payouts of up to ~£1 billion per year the insurance sector also has an important and often under-estimated role to play. In essence, insurance is our means to spread the cost of rebuilding between citizens/organizations and across time to pay for the repair of assets (e.g. our houses). Providing such insurance reliably, accurately and fairly is underpinned by environmental science.

Typically, robust peer-reviewed science is done by academics, funded by government (e.g. by NERC), and is turned into tools such as 'catastrophe models' to assess risk by the insurance sector. This flow of information is, however, not perfect in a number of respects. This includes, but goes beyond, scientists not having a readily accessible list of current business-relevant questions from insurers that are phrased sufficiently tightly for them to work on. More fundamentally, noone in industry, academia or NERC has a full understanding of how, when or why NERC science is, or could be, used by insurers. Compounding this, academics must produce exciting original science, and it is proving difficult to create collaborations that are mutually beneficial and hit both targets - i.e., identified work must meet industry needs whilst also containing (or directly leading to) interesting world-leading science. This mismatch is global, but London's financial strength ideally places the UK to take a world-leading role in fixing it.

The purpose of this fellowship is therefore to facilitate better use of environmental science in insurance through better mutual understanding, co-working and collaboration, particularly by improving structures (e.g. a mixed academic-insurer NERC Guidance Panel, 'sandpit' project-creation workshops, protocols, a 'Data Sharing Network', a data 'hub', 'Urgency' NERC funding responsive to a business need) to better share information and co-design research.

The work of this fellowship will focus on 3 key aspects of the current position that I believe hamper efficient and effective interactions between the NERC's environmental science community and the insurance sector.

Firstly, and most fundamentally, in Strand 1 high-level workshops will be used to map (i.e. determine and report) how and why environmental science is produced for insurance, including how decisions are make and which scientific inputs are most useful. Then 'collaboration pathways', i.e. feasible, timely, and mutually beneficial routes from academic science to insurance decision-making, can be charted. Potentially, such insights could bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of science usage in environmental risk insurance.

To help this occur, Strand 2 targets a foreseeable key aspect in detail i.e., data-sharing. Legal issues, data security and simple inter-insurer competition are all potential barriers, but sharing data can be efficient in that it avoids duplication of effort and new access to data is an ideal incentive for academics. Existing expertise will be captured in a 'Data Sharing Network', whilst 3 mini-projects will focus a network of experts on creating viable practices and protocols, and also to demonstrate the feasibility of data sharing.

Strand 3 will work out how to best co-design research projects. Alongside established practice, it will test out innovative methods, for example exciting 'sandpit-style' meetings containing mixes of insurers and academics will held both in London and at a science conference. The proposed workshop titles 'Existing science, new problems' and 'Existing loss data, new science' illustrate that the mismatch will be tackled from both sides.