Wednesday, January 26th, 2022, 830am - Noon in the Central U.S. Time Zone.
This is a live-synchronized discussion that is hosted virtually.
830 - 10am: Following a keynote presentation from Adam Smith, panelists will join our audience to discuss the effects of climate change on extreme weather and the management practices that mitigate short-term business losses and optimize day-to-day operations.
Moderated by Steve Bennett, Co-Founder and Chief Climate Officer for The Demex Group
Adam Smith, Lead Scientist at the U.S. Billion-dollar Weather and Climate Disasters program, NOAA NCEI Climate Science and Services Division.
Josh Darr, Managing Director and Head of North America Peril Advisory at Guy Carpenter.
Jon Davis, Chief Meteorologist at Everstream Analytics.
1045 - Noon: Following a keynote presentation from Josh Hacker, panelists will join our audience to discuss how climate change will impact long-term investments and capital planning.
Moderated by Julie Pullen, Climate Strategist at Jupiter Intelligence
Josh Hacker, Chief Scientist at Jupiter Intelligence
Jo Paisley, President of GARP Risk Institute
Matt Coleman, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Nephila Climate
Harun Dogo, Executive Director, Global Sustainable Finance at Morgan Stanley
The First Forum on Climate Linked Economics is hosted by the 10th Symposium on Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise as part of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society.
More and more companies are examining their exposure to climate-related risks as a result of the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), credit rating agencies, and other bodies. Millions of businesses operate day-to-day knowing that extreme weather (as influenced by a changing climate) leads to unplanned fluctuations in profitability. The Global Risks 2020 report produced by the World Economic Forum said “…environmental risks have grown in prominence in recent years. For the first time, 'extreme weather events,' 'natural disasters,' and 'failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation' are in the top five global risks for both impact and likelihood of occurrence within the next ten years.
Speakers
Adam Smith
Adam Smith is an applied climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information - Climate Science and Services Division. He is the lead scientist for the U.S. Billion-dollar Weather and Climate Disasters program (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions). He performs research to standardize and integrate many public and private sector disaster data sources into better quality-controlled disaster cost frameworks, as research tools.
Smith regularly briefs the U.S. Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction on U.S. disaster costs and is a NOAA expert on U.S. disaster loss data in support of the international Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2016-2022), the National Institute of Standards and Technology National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (2018-2021), and the American Meteorological Society Committee on Financial Weather Risk Management (2015–2022).
Smith is also the U.S. representative on the new WMO expert team for ‘Cataloguing of Hazardous Weather, Water, Climate, Environmental and Space Weather Events’ (ET-CHE). The purpose of this team is to establish globally agreed standards and procedures for identifying and cataloging hazardous weather, climate, water, and space weather events that have hampered the routine characterization and tracking of such events and associated losses and damages.
Jon Davis
Jon leads Everstream Analytics weather and climate division for energy, agriculture, and supply chain logistics. Based in Barcelona, Spain Jon brings over 35 years of experience and is widely considered one of the foremost experts on the impact of weather and climate on global commodities and business.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) with a degree in meteorology, he spent 18 years on Wall Street in the commodity divisions within Citigroup focusing on risk management in agriculture, energy, and the financial sectors. At the end of Jon’s tenure, he was Chief Meteorologist at Citigroup. At Citigroup, he was recruited by Chesapeake Energy in 2003 and spent 10 years as Chief Meteorologist responsible for monitoring global weather/climate and its impact on energy and agriculture. His team developed state-of-the-art tools to aid in mid-range and intra-seasonal forecasting and applied them to energy and agricultural risk management/hedging.
In 2015, Jon was given the prestigious Award for the Outstanding Contribution to the Advance of Applied Meteorology at the national AMS (American Meteorological Society) meeting for a distinguished career in applying meteorological and climatological knowledge to the energy, industrial, and agricultural sectors. In 2017, Jon was awarded the Kenneth C. Spengler Award for outstanding vision to advance the role of meteorology in the new energy economy and outstanding leadership of the AMS Energy Committee and its conference. Jon was a founding member and first chair of the AMS Energy Committee.
Josh Darr
Joining the firm in 2013, Josh leads a team of seasoned scientists and engineers advising clients on natural catastrophe risk and climate change. Josh’s client efforts surround the impact of weather and climate trends on catastrophe model usage, and applications for underwriting, claims handling, and portfolio management. Josh is the strategy lead for climate change and event response within the Americas.
In addition to responsibilities at Guy Carpenter, Josh is an Adjunct Professor at Northern Illinois University in the Department of Geography & Atmospheric Sciences, commencing that role in 2010. Earlier in his career, Josh was a member of the corporate hedging team for Chesapeake Energy and was a Director of North America Climate Hazards at the modeling firm RMS.
Josh received his BS degree from Cornell University and his MS degree from the University at Albany, New York, both in Atmospheric Sciences. Josh carries the Certified Catastrophe Risk Management Professional designation from the Casualty Actuarial Society, is a Certified Catastrophe Risk Analyst. Within the American Meteorological Society, Josh has served as Chair of the Mentorship and Board of Private Sector Meteorologists and also was a member of the Energy Committee.
Steve Bennett
Steve is a meteorologist and entrepreneur who applies the practical science of climate change to optimize business practices. Steve’s career spans 25-years in the private and public sectors ranging from The Weather Channel to UC San Diego/Scripps. He co-founded and is currently Chief Climate Officer at The Demex Group.
A 1995 graduate of the University of South Alabama, Steve served as a meteorologist in media and commodity trading before co-founding EarthRisk Technologies in 2010. EarthRisk commercialized research from the Climate Research Division of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. EarthRisk developed, patented, licensed, and productized “TempRisk” to enable traders in gas and power markets to quantify weather risk up to five weeks in advance.
In 2015, EarthRisk joined forces with Stormpluse. Stormpulse was one of the first interactive weather applications for hyper-local and advanced storm tracking. The two teams came together and formed Riskpulse. Riskpulse realigned their weather/climate platform for supply chain intelligence. They served Fortune 500 enterprise accounts and grew single-customer annualized revenue by more than 30x in 18 months. DHL and Columbia Capital acquired Riskpulse in 2019 to innovate supply-chain intelligence platforms across DHL’s global supply chain network.
Following Riskpulse's exit, Steve co-founded The Demex Group. Demex built the first-of-its-kind platform for analyzing, pricing, and transferring climate-linked risks at scale. Demex insurance carrier partners embed climate resilience solutions into existing products, such as homeowners or business lines. API integration localizes real-time risk-pricing at the property address level within customer networks. For clients with nuanced financial exposures to weather, our team of climate scientists analyzes historical costs and revenues compared to extreme weather events and produces custom-fit expense models.
Steve is also a 2008 distinguished graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law with a specialization in intellectual property and corporate law.
Josh Hacker
Josh Hacker is an atmospheric scientist with a broad research and science management career, focusing on lower atmosphere prediction and predictability across many time and space scales. His experience spans university and laboratory settings, and most recently the company Jupiter Intelligence that is filling private sector needs for rigorous and reliable information quantifying the costs of climate change on individual companies and market sectors. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Joint Numerical Testbed at NCAR.
Jo Paisley
Jo Paisley is President of the GARP Risk Institute (GRI), the thought leadership arm of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Set up in early 2018, the Institute works across all risk disciplines, with Jo’s focus to date on climate risk management and scenario analysis, stress testing and operational resilience. Her career began at the Bank of England where she worked in a variety of roles, across macroeconomics, statistics, supervision and risk. Her last role was as a Director of the Supervisory Risk Specialists Division within the Prudential Regulation Authority, where she was heavily involved in the design and execution of the UK’s first concurrent stress test in 2014. She left the Bank in 2015 and joined HSBC as their Global Head of Stress Testing. She has also worked as an independent stress testing consultant, advising firms on how to get the most value out of stress testing.
Harun Dogo
Harun Dogo is an Executive Director in the Global Sustainable Finance group at Morgan Stanley, where he leads the Firm’s ESG data efforts, advances quantitative integration of sustainability into investment products across all asset classes, and overseas the development of digital tools for sustainable investing. Prior to joining the Firm, he was an economist at the World Bank, working on a wide range of sustainability and economic policy projects. Earlier in his career, he served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance and was a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, he also holds graduate degrees in applied physics and irregular warfare from the Naval Postgraduate School, and in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
Matt Coleman
For over 15 years, Matt Coleman has helped businesses and governments value and transfer climate risks like wind speed, temperature, and precipitation that affect financial performance. He currently is a director at Nephila Climate. Nephila is the oldest and current largest investment manager globally that specializes in insuring climate and natural catastrophe risk. In his 10 years at Nephila, Matt has:
managed climate investment portfolio planning
educated and liaised with current and prospective investors in Nephila’s investment funds
developed strategic partnerships with dozens of climate risk data providers and originators, and
structured and analyzed climate risk transfer products with cumulative notional value of $5+ billion.
Previously, Matt was a weather risk analyst at investment manager Citadel LLC, supporting investments in energy and reinsurance. Matt also worked within the National Center for Atmospheric Research as a SOARS protégé. He holds B.S. degrees in both Chemistry and Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia. He also holds an M.S. in Meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University and an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Matt supports the American Meteorological Society as a member of the Investment Committee; mentor within the Board for Private Sector Meteorologists mentoring program; and co-founder of the Financial Weather/Climate Risk Management Committee.
Julie Pullen
Dr. Julie Pullen works at the intersection of climate resilience and climate solutions that enhance the life-support system of our planet. She advises on climate risk for the financial and other sectors, and on sustainable investing from a planetary stewardship lens.
Julie is a climate scientist specializing in the ocean and atmosphere and how they communicate and interact with each other. In her research, she collects global observations through fieldwork and utilizes them to improve the fidelity of high-resolution Earth System Models using data science, open-source, and cloud-native computing tools.
Her background is in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems. She brings a unique perspective as a former engineering professor holding leadership roles in academia, non-profit, government, private sector, and scientific societies.
Julie is currently Climate Strategist at Jupiter Intelligence, a climate tech start-up. Jupiter provides data and analytics services to better predict and manage risks from weather and sea-level rise, storm intensification, and changing temperatures caused by medium- to long-term climate change.