Business Risk from Climate Change

Professor Daniel Ralph is a Founder and Academic Director of the Centre for Risk Studies, Professor of Operations Research at Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Churchill College. Daniel’s research interests include identification and management of systemic risk, risk aversion in investment, economic equilibria models and optimisation methods. Management stress tests, via selection and construction of catastrophe scenarios, is one focus of his work in the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies. Another is the role and expression of risk management within organisations. Daniel engages across scientific and social science academia, a variety of commercial and industrial sectors, and government policy making. He was Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Programming (Series B) from 2007-2013.

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Erik Mackie is Public Engagement Coordinator at Cambridge Zero and an Honorary Researcher at the British Antarctic Survey. His research interests include climate change, physical oceanography, satellite remote sensing, and sea level rise. He studied applied mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and completed his PhD joint between the University of Bristol and the British Antarctic Survey, using high-resolution satellite data to investigate the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its response to climate change. He was also a Policy Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in Westminster, where he authored a briefing for parliamentarians on sea level rise and the risks of extreme sea level events for the UK.

Risa Ueno is a PhD student at the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on developing machine learning techniques to obtain better future projections of climate extremes in megacities and assessing their potential impact on urban infrastructure resilience. She has a masters in computational statistics and machine learning from UCL and studied undergraduate physics at Imperial College London. She worked at IBM as a technology consultant for two years before discovering the world of machine learning research.

Colin is responsible for managing Risk across Citi’s Institutional Client Group, including Citi Private Bank, Consumer and Commercial Banking businesses in EMEA. He is a member of the EMEA Operating Committee, Global Risk Management Executive Committee and Global Information Security Committee. Colin managed Citi’s cross-divisional contingency planning and crisis management events, notably orchestrating Citi’s responses to the Arab Spring, GIIPS, Russia / Ukraine, Argentina (2016) and most recently U.K. Referendum and Brexit contingency plans. He established Citi’s “second line” Cyber Risk Management Function and is a member of the Bank of England’s Cross Market Operational Resilience Group (CMORG).

Dr Bronwyn Claire leads ClimateWise, a group of 25 insurance industry members who are responding to the risks and opportunities of climate change. ClimateWise members are annually independently reviewed on the integration of the seven ClimateWise Principles across their business activities, including leading in the identification, understanding and management of climate risk, informing public policy, incorporating climate-related issues into investments and strategies, and supporting climate awareness amongst clients and customers. The ClimateWise Principles Independent Review 2019 is a milestone for ClimateWise members, representing the first year of reporting in full alignment with the TCFD and providing useful reflections on the challenges and opportunities for the industry in implementing TCFD recommendations. ClimateWise members also actively participate in various research projects that explore how the industry can better support society to transition to a zero carbon, climate-resilient future. Last year ClimateWise launched the Transition and Physical risk frameworks for assessing the impact of risks from climate change on infrastructure assets.

Penny grew up in North London and gained her first experience of scientific research as a WISE Scholar at GEC in her sixth form. She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, and was sponsored by British Gas, where she researched the then new area of solid oxide fuel cells. She joined the Ministry of Defence as a Scientific Officer in 1993. There she designed novel armours for fighting vehicles, conducting many explosives trials and becoming the national expert on electrically powered armours. She led several research groups in the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), covering Materials Science, Acoustics, Dispersion Hazard Prediction and more before leading Dstl’s Physics Department, and becoming a fellow and trustee of the Institute of Physics. In 2012 she moved to be the head of Dstl’s Cyber and Information Division and took up her visiting professorship in Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. She was the executive sponsor of Dstl’s gender equality network and a county silver commander for major incident response. Just prior to taking over at the Met Office Penny became Dstl’s acting Chief Technical Officer. She was appointed the first female CEO at the Met Office in 2018, and is our national representative at the World Meteorological Congress.

Penny has a strong interest in innovation and exploiting intellectual property, as part of which she has served as a director of Ploughshare Innovations and a mentor for Future Worlds. In her personal life she is an expert choral singer and lover of the natural world, which also led to a stint as treasurer and trustee of Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. She is married to a teacher and they have two grown-up children, both also singers.

Zoë is a Managing Director and Group Head of the HSBC Centre of Sustainable Finance which she set up in 2018. The Centre collaborates with colleagues across HSBC and external partners to produce thought leadership on critical issues to scale up and mobilise capital to address sustainability challenges, particularly climate change. Since joining HSBC in 2010, Zoë has co-authored reports on low-carbon opportunities in bond and equity markets, as well as long-term carbon and water risks. She has worked in financial markets providing advisory services to a global client base since 1997. Zoë is a Commissioner on the Energy Transition Commission and is a Member of the WEF Global Future Council on Global Public Goods in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Jo Paisley is Co-President of the GARP Risk Institute, the thought leadership arm of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Set up in early 2018, the Institute works across all risk disciplines, focussing to date on climate risk management and scenario analysis, stress testing and operational resilience. Prior to joining GARP, she worked at the Bank of England 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. 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 their stress testing.