Such information helps academics such as Ault better grasp how their research can be best applied and how to communicate the science of drought and tools they have developed to end-users.
“We’re working in tandem with some of our partners in the private sector to take the very broad scope of research on drought that my group and my collaborators have been doing – especially year-to-year and multi-year variations in drought – and adapt it to something actionable and usable for the insurance and reinsurance industries,” Ault said.
For Cornell Atkinson, this project aligns with its core mission of supporting visionary research that drives meaningful impact across public opinion, policy, and corporate practices. By leveraging the WTW partnership to gain critical business context and access to their extensive industry network, the project aims not only to enhance WTW's approach to drought risk management but, more crucially, to catalyze industry-wide transformation in how these risks are understood, measured, and mitigated.
“The long-term goal of this research extends beyond a single partnership,” said Patrick Beary, the Bruce H. Bailey Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Cornell Atkinson. Cornell Atkinson aims to support the broader insurance and risk management sectors by sharing knowledge supported by research and data and by improving drought resilience strategies, Beary said.
“We’re partnering with Cornell so we can avoid coming to the wrong conclusions about how likely or unlikely something like a multi-year drought may be,” said Scott St. George, head of weather and climate research for WTW. In his role, St. George interacts between WTW staff, experts and insurance actuaries, economists and others, and academic partners like Ault, who are specialists in the kinds of risks that are important to the insurance industry.
“We’re asking for some technical advice about what aspect of drought is going to be most important depending on where you are in the world, or what kind of activity you’re involved in,” St. George said.
The collaboration will include such things as identifying areas where climate may particularly amplify drought, estimating drought risk more accurately, and creating new tools and datasets to predict single and multi-year drought.
Researchers and insurers use two fundamentally different data sources – one looking back, the other looking ahead – to assess drought risk.
Historical data reveals patterns of the past that inform about drought. “The big problem that we’re all up against is that the historical data alone doesn’t paint a complete picture of risk because the climate is changing,” Ault said.
And so to understand about future risk of hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and drought, risk managers rely on a second data source: climate models.
“When we’re trying to understand the future of water supply, we depend on climate models to give us an indication of how it has changed, is changing, and how it will change in the future,” St. George said. “But we also know even the latest generation of climate models gets some things about drought wrong.”
Most models are deficient at simulating year-to-year and multi-year variations in drought, Ault said. To tackle this issue, Ault and colleagues have been working to connect the historical patterns of the past with the climate model projections of the future.
Ault’s aims are to develop the kinds of tools and products that people can use to make the assessments and do the analyses they need to anticipate risks and then be better equipped to appropriately price home insurance values for places prone to fires or flooding, for example.
Ault and colleagues are also investigating the downstream effects of drought. For example, a drought in the Midwest might lower water levels in the Missouri or Mississippi rivers to potentially affect shipping, and slow supply chains; the risk of fires may affect home insurance pricing; energy sectors may be affected when hydroelectric power is limited or when a shortage of fresh water for cooling nuclear power facilities affects energy outputs.
In these ways, Ault’s work may expand to eventually include energy, financial or public policy sectors, or even small-scale community nongovernmental organizations.
“These considerations are very broad in their reach,” Ault said. “It’s a whole ecosystem of related needs.”
Cornell Atkinson, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary, has been at the forefront of advancing sustainability efforts by uniting experts and external partners to address global challenges. Since 2010, the center has awarded $45 million to sustainability research, thereby supporting 700 faculty fellows and administering more than 1,500 grants and awards.
Source : cornell.edu