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WORK TITLE: The Cure for Catastrophe
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-muir-wood-18ab975 * http://www.rms.com/resilience/html/robert-muirwood.html * http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=20963688&privcapId=47528977 * “Robert Muir Wood is the chief research officer of Risk Management Solutions and a visiting professor at University College London’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. He is the founding editor of the magazine Terra Nova and has published six books.”
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 78094424
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Wood, Robert Muir
Variant(s): Vud, Robert Miï¸ u︡ir
Muir-Wood, Robert
Birth date: 1951-12-27
Affiliation: University of Cambridge
Found in: His On the rocks, 1978: t.p. (Dr. Robert Muir Wood; Dept.
of Mineralogy & Petrology, Cambridge U.)
His The dark side of the earth, 1985: CIP t.p. (Robert Muir
Wood)
His The dark side of the earth, 1986, c1985: CIP t.p.
(Robert Muir Wood) data sheet (b. 12/27/51) CIP later
impression, not catal.)
Vidkryvaiï¸ u︡chy praistoriiï¸ u︡, 2000: t.p. (Robert
Miï¸ u︡ir Vud)
The cure for catastrophe, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Robert
Muir-Wood)
Associated language:
eng
Invalid LCCN: n 2016012491
================================================================================
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PERSONAL
Born December 27, 1951.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Mineralogist, educator, and writer. Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, research fellow in Department of Mineralogy & Petrology; Risk Management Solutions, chief research officer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Chief research officer at Risk Management Solutions, Robert Muir-Wood is a risk manager who specializes in modeling natural catastrophes and identifying the potential locations and consequences of magnitude 9 earthquakes worldwide. With a Ph.D. in earth sciences from Cambridge University and more than twenty years of experience developing probabilistic catastrophe models, Muir-Wood has published numerous books on geology, earthquakes, and prehistory. He has also served as a fellow in the Department of Mineralogy & Petrology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. Muir-Wood wrote Discovering Prehistory in 2001 for the “Young Encyclopedia” series, for children aged seven and up. In clear, authoritative text, he offers information on dinosaurs, how fossils are made, the age of the earth, prehistoric man, and cave paintings. The book is a quick reference tool with in-depth resources that include cut-away illustrations and diagrams.
In 2016, Muir-Wood published The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters. Claiming that we cannot stop natural disasters but that we can make them less disastrous, Muir-Wood describes how floods, earthquakes, wildfires, tornados, and hurricanes are made incredibly more deadly and costly because people build brick buildings in earthquake zones, timber buildings in fire areas, and houses along coastlines. He notes that eighteen of the twenty most expensive catastrophes since 1970 have occurred after 1990, and ten of them after 2000.
A writer in Publishers Weekly commented on how “his meticulous reportage on a number of environmental calamities over the past 300 years” offers a cautionary look at disaster policy. Muir-Wood uses examples ranging from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to show how smart decisions and new technologies can be employed to make natural disasters less catastrophic. In an interview with John Weber in A.M. Best Newswire, Muir-Wood explained that we can no longer use models based on an average of the last 100 years because risk is changing; thus, “we have to explore how to capture that change, how to pass it on to other clients who use our models for actually how they price and manage their risk.”
The Cure for Catastrophe advocates for a new, practical scientific approach to disaster risk reduction. In American Scientist, Daniel P. Aldrich noted how Muir-Wood “adopts a science journalism approach, skipping from disaster to disaster, time period to time period, to get his point across. Throughout the book, he builds on the argument that disasters are political.” According to a writer online at Geographical: “With a warmer climate predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of tropical storms, Muir-Wood’s critical thinking couldn’t have better timing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
A.M. Best Newswire, May 24, 2016, “RMS Chief Research Officer: Risk Models Move Beyond Insurance.”
American Scientist, January-February, 2017, Daniel P. Aldrich, review of The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters, p. 51.
Financial Executive, January-February, 2007, Gregory J. Millman, “Managing Catastrophic Risk: Getting beyond the Insurance Crisis,” p. 28.
Library Journal, July 1, 2016, Venessa Hughes, review of The Cure for Catastrophe, p. 103.
Publishers Weekly, June 13, 2016, review of The Cure for Catastrophe, p. 88.
ONLINE
Geographical, http://geographical.co.uk/ (January 1, 2017), review of Cure for Catastrophe.
Robert Muir-Wood
Chief Research Officer
Robert works to enhance approaches to natural catastrophe modeling, identify models for new areas of risk, and explore expanded applications for catastrophe modeling. Recently, he has been focusing on identifying the potential locations and consequences of magnitude 9 earthquakes worldwide.
In 2012, as part of Mexico's presidency of the G20, he helped promote government usage of catastrophe models for managing national disaster risks. Robert has more than 20 years of experience developing probabilistic catastrophe models. He was lead author for the 2007 IPCC 4th Assessment Report and 2011 IPCC Special Report on Extremes, is a member of the Climate Risk and Insurance Working Group for the Geneva Association, and is vice-chair of the OECD panel on the Financial Consequences of Large Scale Catastrophes.
He is the author of six books, as well as numerous papers and articles in scientific and industry publications. He holds a degree in natural sciences and a PhD in Earth sciences, both from Cambridge University.
Robert Muir-Wood, Ph.D.
Chief Research Officer, RMS
Robert serves as Chief Research Officer at RMS. He works to enhance approaches to natural catastrophe modeling, identify models for new areas of risk, and explore expanded applications for catastrophe modeling.
In 2012, as part of Mexico's presidency of the G20, he helped promote government usage of catastrophe models for managing national disaster risks. Robert has more than 20 years of experience developing probabilistic catastrophe models. He was lead author for the 2007 IPCC 4th Assessment Report and 2011 IPCC Special Report on Extremes, is a member of the Climate Risk and Insurance Working Group for the Geneva Association, and is vice-chair of the OECD panel on the Financial Consequences of Large Scale Catastrophes. He is the author of six books, as well as numerous papers and articles in scientific and industry publications. He holds a degree in natural sciences and a Ph.D. in Earth sciences, both from Cambridge University.
Dr. Robert Muir-wood
Chief Research Officer, RMS
Robert is the chief research officer of science and technology at RMS. His responsibilities include enhancing approaches to and applications of natural catastrophe modeling. Robert has more than 20 years’ experience in developing probabilistic models to characterize the risk and ramifications of natural and human-led shocks.
He has recently pioneered research into the clustering of catastrophic events, extreme liquefaction, loss amplification factors in “super cats,” time-varying activity rates, and the economic and social impacts of water scarcity.
Robert was the lead author on insurance, finance, and climate change for the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report. He was also appointed a key contributor to the 2014 Risky Business study by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson.
Robert has written six books, along with numerous papers and articles in scientific and industry publications. He is a member of the High Level Advisory Board of the OECD International Network on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes. Robert holds a first-class degree in natural sciences and a Ph.D. in earth sciences, both from Cambridge University, and he was a research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Robert Muir-Wood
Chief Research Officer at Risk Management Solutions
London, United Kingdom
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obert Muir-Wood
Chief Research Officer, RMS, United States
Robert Muir-Wood co-founded the London office of Risk Management Solutions in 1996, and is the RMS Chief Research Officer. He has a first class degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences both from Cambridge University and more than 20 years experience in developing probabilistic catastrophe models. He has led projects to build models for earthquake, tropical cyclone, windstorm and flood, in Europe, Japan, North America, Caribbean and Australia. He has been the technical lead on a number of Catastrophe risk securitization transactions and lectured widely on catastrophe risk, the use of catastrophe models for disaster risk reduction and the business response to climate change. He was Lead Author for the 2007 4th IPCC Assessment Report and the 2011 IPCC Special Report on Extremes, is Vice Chair of the OECD High Level Advisory Board of the International Network on the Financial Management of Large Scale Catastrophes and was on the Technical Advisory Board for the 2014 study of US climate change costs ‘Risky Business’. He is the author of many scientific papers on the analysis of earthquakes, hurricanes, windstorms and floods, and has published more than 200 articles and six books.”
- See more at: http://www.internationalinsurance.org/events/global-insurance-forum/presenters/robert-muir-wood-/#sthash.n1bFintc.dpuf
Robert Muir-Wood
Robert Muir Wood is the chief research officer of Risk Management Solutions and a visiting professor at University College London's Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. He is the founding editor of the magazine Terra Nova and has published six books. He lives in London, United Kingdom.
Robert Muir-Wood
Titles: On the Rocks, The Dark Side of the Earth, Earthquakes and Volcanoes, Prehistory and the Dinosaurs, The Cure for Catastrophe
Agent: Sophie Lambert
About Robert Muir-Wood
One of the world experts on catastrophes, Robert is both the head of research at the world’s largest catastrophe modelling company, RMS, and a Visiting Professor at UCL’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. His expertise is sought around the world – he was a Lead Author on climate and catastrophe risk for two IPCC reports (including the Nobel Peace Prize winning 4th Assessment Report). He has also written six previous books for adults and children, including On the Rocks, to accompany a BBC series of the same name, which sold more than 60,000 copies.
Muir-Wood, Robert. The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters
Venessa Hughes
141.12 (July 1, 2016): p103.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Muir-Wood, Robert. The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters. Basic. Sept. 2016.368p. notes, index. ISBN 9780465060948. $28.99; ebk. ISBN 9780465096473. SCI
In an era when natural disasters seem to be worsening, there may be solutions to rising death tolls and growing refugee populations. In this astute work, Muir-Wood (chief research officer, Risk Management Solutions; The Dark Side of the Earth) proposes that if we change certain habits, such as using building materials that are ill-suited for places with frequent catastrophes, we might prevent the very tragedies we claim destroy lives. The author examines how this history of human folly spawned disaster and catastrophe insurance and disaster journalism, which in turn led to some well-known, if controversial, concepts, such as the Richter Scale. He also shows how when forced to produce answers (for instance, if unable or unwilling to leave disaster-prone areas), humans have come up with ingenious ways to ride out or escape the storms. When facing future events, if we learn from the past, more lives might be saved. VERDICT Readers interested in natural disasters, climate change, and weather will be riveted by this comprehensive account of emergency management.--Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY
Hughes, Venessa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hughes, Venessa. "Muir-Wood, Robert. The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters." Library Journal, 1 July 2016, p. 103+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302789&it=r&asid=aa6db571bbd6fd71e3ff917f4db813cf. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302789
The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters
263.24 (June 13, 2016): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters
Robert Muir-Wood. Basic, $28.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-465-06094-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Muir-Wood, chief research officer at Risk Management Solutions, exhaustively chronicles modern history's natural disasters and humankind's evolving--if erratic--responses to them. Catastrophes such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake were once interpreted as "acts of fate," but centuries of meteorological, engineering, and economic research have ushered in "the modern social understanding of disaster's and the practical scientific approach to disaster risk reduction." Recent decades have seen significant post-disaster advancements in the fields of architecture, insurance, forecasting, and probabilistic "catastrophe modeling." But Muir-Wood contends that there remain enormous impediments to managing natural disasters: namely, the rise in these events as a result of climate change, the increasingly devastating consequences in a world where "the number of people and buildings in harm's way keeps rising," and the prevalence of human denial and bureaucratic negligence. In his meticulous reportage on a number of environmental calamities over the past 300 years, the author offers a cautionary map of the route we took to arrive at this vital geologic moment. The path forward should entail "both disaster policy and disaster culture," Muir-Wood argues: a governing body and a motivated global community that will collaboratively and inventively undertake the management of inevitable catastrophes. Agent: Alex Christofi, Conville & Walsh. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters." Publishers Weekly, 13 June 2016, p. 88. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458871756&it=r&asid=bc700bb5a2104a838c88e2846e15a5b3. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458871756
Deconstructing disaster
Daniel P. Aldrich
105.1 (January-February 2017): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
http://www.americanscientist.org/
THE CURE FOR CATASTROPHE: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disaster. Robert Muir-Wood. 368 pp. Basic Books. 2016. $29.99.
LOVE CANAL: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present. Richard S. Newman. 328 pp. Oxford University Press. 2016. $29.95.
Casual observers of catastrophe continue to distinguish between human-caused and natural disasters, but in either case consider them to be unforeseeable, out-of-nowhere events. Two recent books--Love Canal, by Richard Newman, and The Cure for Catastrophe, by Robert Muir-Wood--might change some minds.
Although oil spills and train derailments that release hazardous substances are clearly the unintended results of societal choices, other well-publicized catastrophes generally understood to be "natural" disasters should be seen in the same light. The flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, for example, or the 18,500 deaths from the compounded disasters in Tohoku, japan, in February 2011, or the deaths of 5,000 school children in China following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake--these events were not so-called acts of God. (The term is still used in contract law to designate an unanticipated calamity.) In the 20th and 21st centuries, poor political and economic choices have compounded the effect of natural events and put people unnecessarily at risk.
These two books tell very different stories about disaster, but in the end they mutually reinforce our recognition of the critical nature of regulation, the role of citizen science, and the important part played by cultures and institutions in mitigating risk. Although we're accustomed to defining the critical juncture of a disaster as the moment the event affects local residents, in reality some of the most important decisions happened long before, when decision makers set safety standards and building codes and implemented recovery frameworks. At the local level, residents can and should participate as active partners in formulating disaster mitigation plans, instead of being passive recipients of them. Everyday citizens can collect, analyze, and interpret data critical for their own health and survival. For example, participants in a global Web 2.0 project called Safecast share measurements of environmental radiation and other pollutants. Finally, local residents can create safety cultures that reduce disaster risk, while governments set up institutions to smooth recovery processes and ensure equity.
Newman's well-written, deeply researched book tells the full story of the chemical disaster at Love Canal, a suburban neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York. Newman, a historian specializing in environmental and early American history, begins the story centuries before Love Canal became synonymous with ecological catastrophe. He describes the initial Western exploration of the area during the 17th century, then focuses intently on the dreams of late-19th-century visionary William Love, for whom the canal was named. Love envisioned generating electricity for a planned model community (to be called, naturally enough, Model City) by harnessing the power of water drawn from nearby Niagara Falls through engineered waterways.
When that exercise in futuricity fell apart, it left behind a clay-lined canal that was ideal for the area s next phase of use: answering the electrochemical industry's need for a dumping ground. In 1942 Elon Hooker, civil engineer and captain of industry, began entombing some 22,000 tons of chemical waste in the premade canals. It was a legal move at the time, as no laws covered toxic waste disposal (or worker safety, for that matter) in the first half of the 20th century. Chemicals placed in the ditch included benzene, dioxins, and 10 other known carcinogens. Sealing the dump in 1953, Hooker Chemical Company officers believed that as long as the site was left alone, the clay would prevent any waste from escaping.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Yet the local school board was already eying the land in 1952, and the next year it purchased the site for $1 from Hooker Chemical. When the school board had first approached Hooker about the property, the company dutifully warned them about the site's hazardous contents. Newman notes that Hooker officials also pressed for assurances from the board that, should plans for a subdivision move forward, "mention of the chemical dump ... would be included in all subsequent transactions between the city and developers, and then between developers and homeowners." This, Hooker officials hoped, would absolve them of liability. The board agreed to the stipulation, but failed to follow through. After using some of the land for two schools in the early 1950s, the school board sold unused land to housing developers in the late 1950s, despite renewed warnings from Hooker Chemical executives and attorneys.
Things went downhill from there. Paint peeled off homes. Children played pop rocks, throwing phosphorous-laced stones at the ground after discovering the rocks would explode on impact. People complained of foul odors and dying vegetation. One family, the Schroeders, found that its sunken fiberglass swimming pool had risen from its usual position by two feet, pushed up by chemicals flooding into the groundwater. A number of residents noticed health changes in their families, including seemingly high numbers of miscarriages, respiratory problems, and cancer. As the community lost the rhythms of normal life, the women who lived there, led by people such as Lois Gibbs, mobilized into a grassroots movement in the 1970s. Pushing hard against the weak regulation that had allowed the disaster to happen in the first place and not content with small-scale measures (such as limited evacuations), residents reached out to find regional and national allies.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Political action around the Love Canal event, which is readily classified with "human-made disasters," gained steam just when public attention was beginning to galvanize around issues of environmental justice. Newman shows how national political figures used Love Canal as a policy window through which .they could develop the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (or CERCLA, known more colloquially as Superfund), which pushed responsibility back onto private developers. Even firms such as Hooker, which had followed the rules when it disposed of the chemicals, were liable to help clean up the site later. Eventually all of the residents from Love Canal, even those not living directly over the disposal sites, were moved out, and the area was off-limits for decades as it was remediated. Despite the tremendous public concern about this environmental disaster, epidemiologists and scientists have drawn mixed conclusions from peer-reviewed health studies of former residents. Some scientists, such as cancer researcher Beverly Paigen, argued in the late 1970s that residents clearly suffered adverse health effects. But studies carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the early 1980s using blood samples found almost no chromosomal aberrations between residents and nonresidents. As with the Chernobyl disaster, outsiders cannot absolutely agree on the scope of the damage to those exposed to toxic chemicals.
The Love Canal story illuminates several broader issues, including the concept of putting areas considered of lesser "quality" into service for disposable land uses or as sacrifice zones for industry. When embarking on controversial new projects, developers and bureaucrats alike regularly look for land that has already been degraded or poorly used. The story also underscores the need for citizen advocacy and pushback on land-use plans. As a diverse group of scholars--from political scientist Greg McAvoy to anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, and including myself--have argued, opposition that used to be pejoratively labeled "not in my back yard" (or, NIMBY) typically catalyzes better public policy.
Muir-Wood's narrative is choppier than Newman's, and it breaks from the linear sequence common to historical and academic writing. Instead, the author adopts a science journalism approach, skipping from disaster to disaster, time period to time period, to get his point across. Throughout the book, he builds on the argument that disasters are political: "Disasters consume wealth, depreciate land values, and threaten governments.... From Simon Bolivar to Fidel Castro, leaders have understood the need to outwit catastrophes in order to maintain their authority." Among other things, the political sphere affects the nature of the built environment as well as the accepted level of risk tolerance. "Disasters are determined," Muir-Wood observes, "by what we build, where we choose to live, how we prepare, and how we communicate warnings." He then links a variety of catastrophes over time and regions, with examples ranging from a Renaissance-era earthquake in Portugal to modern-day catastrophes such as the 2010 Chilean earthquake and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
He illustrates how some low-cost mechanisms--such as disaster-response education--have shown success in communities, such as Kamaishi, Japan, during the March 11, 2011, tsunami. There, a professor had developed educational programs to convey lessons learned from some successful evacuations immediately preceding the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Although a number of regions, including Chile, San Francisco, and Wellington, New Zealand, have invested in upgrading their building infrastructure, Muir-Wood argues that we all too often construct buildings to withstand only the latest disaster. This approach can be especially hazardous in areas prone to multiple kinds of catastrophe--for example, earthquakes and wildfire, as in certain parts of California, or earthquakes and typhoons in Japan.
Especially among developing nations, where regulation is weak and construction often unsupervised, we see the same problems: "bad design, bad execution, bad reinforcing, bad concrete." Muir-Wood finds that wealth and urbanization--that is, offshoots of economic development--reduce casualties. Nations, however, do not need money to save lives: Cuba's proactive civil defense program has reduced hurricane casualties to close to zero. Rather than relying on high levels of government spending, Cuba uses public education, good communication systems, and community mobilization to prepare the nation for storms.
The book points out that although the insurance and re-insurance markets are often held up as examples of how to mitigate damage, private insurance is actually playing a diminishing role in the United States. Instead, the federal government is paying more and more of the compensation provided to victims of disaster. As I have observed in my own research, there are other ways to reduce damage: Social capital and social ties are critical, with neighbors often serving as emergency first responders, and local nongovernmental organizations saving lives and accelerating recovery. Although reinforcing existing cohesion and building new social networks takes a great deal of time, these tactics are generally far cheaper than physical infrastructure projects. In the end, to reduce casualties and improve response, a bottom-up, grassroots disaster culture will need to work side by side with top-down, forward-thinking institutions willing to enact substantial change. No government pronouncement or plan will be effective without buyin from local residents; at the same time, neighborhoods and communities rely on the resources held by the central government.
Both books recognize an important lesson that economic historian John Singleton offers in his recent book Economic and Natural Disasters Since 1900: Disasters--even those typically categorized as unpredictable--happen during times of crisis. Although we typically notice only a crisis's trigger moment and its tragic aftermath, in reality regulatory and market choices well before the event create the necessary conditions for the problem. And so the cycle continues. Whether by filling in marshland, developing coastal properties, or disposing of waste in convenient but unsustainable ways, we continue to place ourselves in harm's way.
Yet as time moves on, more tools are available to predict and mitigate risk. Muir-Wood recounts how in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which pushed nine insurance companies into bankruptcy, insurers developed catastrophe models based on "100,000 years of synthetic catastrophic histories"; they used these models to calculate insurance prices and establish how much to hold in reserve in the event of a year of serious losses. As Muir-Wood points out, "The technology that protects the markets can also protect people." "Political leaders," he adds, "will increasingly be expected to account for latent disaster deaths and losses before they happen." This kind of modeling is, in a sense, just another way to learn from the past. Sharing and contextualizing disaster narratives are others. Hopefully Love Canal and The Cure for Catastrophe will help readers think more carefully about the downstream consequences of our often shortsighted choices.
Daniel P. Aldrich is professor and director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University. Twitter: @danielpaldrich.
Caption: Located behind a warning-bedecked fence by the time this 1978 photo was taken, the 99th Street School had opened in 1955. It represented a second construction attempt, positioned 30 yards north of the original site. The rebuild occurred after the original school's foundation sank into a chemical pit. From Love Canal.
Caption: Photographs of the cleanup efforts in Love Canal underscored the severity of the problem, and images of the thousands of barrels of toxic waste removed from the site proved especially symbolic. As author Richard S. Newman notes, "Suddenly, activists did not have to explain chemicals' hazards; pictures of the toxic landscape circulated widely. This disaster iconography would remain a powerful part of the Love Canal story for years to come." From Love Canal.
Caption: Love Canal resident and community activist Lois Gibbs met frequently with state and federal government officials, such as New York Governor Hugh Carey, as captured in this news photograph. The grassroots movement that emerged out of the fears and frustrations of local residents became a vital component among a combination of bottom-up and top-down political efforts that eventually led to the area's evacuation, cleanup, and remediation. From Love Canal.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Aldrich, Daniel P. "Deconstructing disaster." American Scientist, vol. 105, no. 1, 2017, p. 51+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477991435&it=r&asid=b388af37ba46d842dd662ead91df4524. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477991435
Managing catastrophic risk: getting beyond the insurance crisis; The incidence of catastrophic risk has increased markedly, and insurance rates have risen with it. Some companies are re-examining the issue of self-insurance or even doing without and using their equity base to cover potential risks
Gregory J. Millman
23.1 (January-February 2007): p28.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Financial Executives International
http://www.financialexecutives.org/
It probably won't come as a surprise to the average reader of the day's headlines, but statistically, the world is getting riskier--and insurance scarcer. "I think there is a crisis," says Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), one of the leading risk modeling firms.
Eighteen of the 20 costliest catastrophes since 1970 have occurred after 1990, and 10 of them after 2000. Risk modeling firms have raised their estimate for the frequency of hurricanes, and the more intense storms are increasing more than less intense storms. RMS's estimate of the loss from a 100-year storm has risen almost 50 percent, Muir-Wood says, from $70 billion to $105 billion. One reason: economic demand surge, that is, the rise in prices for materials and labor that people need to make repairs
There are also brand new sources of risk to consider. Ten of the world's 15 most deadly terrorist attacks came after 1993, and avian flu has focused new attention on the risk of a pandemic.
Not only are catastrophes happening more often, they're causing more economic damage when they do. The U.S. population continues to move to areas prone to disaster, so there are more people and assets at risk. "The five fastest-growing states are five wildfire states in the American Northwest," says James C. Schwab, senior research associate at the American Planning Association. Over half of the U.S. population lives in coastal regions, and the population density of the hurricane-prone Southeast has grown much faster than that of the nation as a whole.
Moreover, new business models that place more reliance on global supply chains suggests more economic vulnerability to catastrophes than ever before. According to the U.S. Department of State, most U.S. terrorism targets are businesses. "My concern would be that the loss of critical skill sets anywhere in the world could paralyze us from an economic and social standpoint," says Gary Lynch, global leader of Risk Intelligence Strategies and Resiliency Solutions in insurance broker Marsh Inc.'s Risk Consulting practice.
The loss of skilled engineers, capital markets decision-makers, cleared personnel in the defense industry, even the highly trained operators of cranes in container shipping ports could cripple a company and bring a supply chain, or in some cases even a whole region, to an economic halt, Lynch suggests.
Much of the new risk is not insurable. There is, for example, no insurance against a pandemic (although workers compensation could cover some of the damage). Even for traditionally insurable property and casualty risks, insurers and reinsurers are cutting capacity and raising rates.
In hurricane territory, especially Florida and the Gulf Coast, companies confront astronomical premiums for minuscule coverage amounts "In 2005, we had $1.2 billion in coverage with a $60 million deductible and paid $4.5 million in premium," says Bill Wheatley, treasurer of Florida's Memorial Healthcare System. "In 2006, we could only get $100 million in coverage, for a $100 million deductible, and were quoted $12.5 million in premium."
Memorial opted to go without coverage in 2006. It wasn't alone. Jerry McAloon, senior vice president of Aon Natural Resources, says, "As we went into the 2006 season, there was simply nowhere the capacity available at any price, as had been available in previous years, and the capacity that was available was at many multiples of what it had cost in prior years. So, most companies simply had no choice but to do without."
That sounds like bad news, but in fact it might be good news for shareholders. The new environment is forcing companies to re-think their approach to risk management. "We saw our premiums jump exponentially for property and windstorm, and retentions thrown at us that took our breath away," says John Phelps, director of risk management for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of South Florida Inc. "One of the things we learned from that was that we need to reduce our reliance on insurance as a solution."
In fact, there's a strong case to be made that, at least for larger public corporations, going without catastrophe insurance may be the best approach from a shareholder value perspective. "It's important to start out by recognizing that the corporate firm, in and of itself, is an incredibly effective risk management mechanism," says Clifford Smith, a professor of business administration and finance and economics at the Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester. "Corporations can take on risks that individuals have a harder time managing." Smaller entities are also finding ways to manage risks effectively without insurance.
The Case for Going Bare
Smith co-authored a study of energy giant BP plc's risk management approach, published in 1993 in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. The study is timely now because BP, despite its recent, well-publicized catastrophes in Alaska and Texas, has reviewed its approach and decided to stick with self-insurance.
Essentially, BP has turned traditional thinking about insurance inside-out, and decided to purchase insurance against small losses, but to self-insure against large, catastrophic ones. The textbook approach to insurance is just the opposite--to self-insure against small losses but purchase insurance against big ones. In the current insurance climate, BP's unorthodox approach merits serious consideration by other companies.
Perhaps unorthodox is the wrong word. There isn't much orthodoxy about purchasing insurance, and reasons for buying insurance are often not defined in financially orthodox cost-of-capital or shareholder value terms. Managers may buy insurance for cosmetic, rather than economic reasons.
"There are many and varied reasons for buying insurance, even for large corporations," says Aon's McAloon. "If you're buying to protect earnings, you might buy differently than if you're looking to protect cash flows. Sometimes you buy it not because the financial statements need it but because you have obligations, mortgages or project financing where it's a requirement. Sometimes, even for the largest companies, it's psychological--the CEO doesn't want to look at a TV camera and say, 'We didn't insure.'"
Whatever the reason, there's good reason to believe that insurance against small losses can be a better deal for shareholders than insurance against catastrophes. Small losses often stem from commonplace events, such as accidents, fires and equipment breakdowns. They happen frequently, and independently of each other, so the law of large numbers comes into play, and the insurer can reliably predict annual losses and set a premium that will cover them.
With that, the market for this kind of insurance is competitive, with low barriers to entry and low rates. Companies that buy insurance against small losses can benefit from insurer advice on preventing losses, and on insurer expertise in settling claims. They can also be reasonably confident that insurers will pay rather than dispute a claim. In short, they get their money's worth.
That's not the case with catastrophic losses. They don't happen often enough for the law of large numbers to work. What's more, the catastrophe claims are highly correlated and hard to predict. Insurers don't have the same depth of actuarial records for catastrophic risks as they do for, say, fires, so they have turned to statistical modeling to predict losses. But in several recent catastrophes, the models were wrong.
Models Missed the Mark
Gary Kaplan, chief underwriting officer for Zurich North America Commercial, says of the 2004-2005 hurricane season, "we found that some aspects of the model were pretty far off." Models underestimated how much prices for materials and labor would rise after the storm. They also underestimated the damage to building contents. Forecasts "were not as accurate as we thought" about how various types of buildings would hold up in storms.
Model-makers such as RMS and insurers like Zurich have certainly adjusted their models to include what they have learned. Nonetheless, skepticism about models lingers. Phelps of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida says, "Modeling with short-term history produces results with minimal credibility. Over 20 years, it becomes more accurate, and over a hundred years, it becomes very accurate. But how do you price today for next year's risk when you have modeling that has questionable credibility in the short term?"
Uncertainty about risk magnifies the risk. Because insurers charge for taking risks, they charge more to take unpredictable risks than they charge to take fairly predictable ones. They can charge much more than they need to cover risks.
During the decade ending in 1989, Smith and his co-author wrote, BP paid over a billion dollars in premiums and collected only $250 million in claims. Insurers are, of course, happier to collect premiums than to pay claims. In one large liability claim, it took BP years and an estimated $1 million in legal costs and management time to collect only 70 percent of the claim.
Sometimes, members of the Lloyds syndicate have sued under-writers for malpractice in order to avoid paying claims. Bruce Jeffries, managing director of Aon Natural Resources, says, "Every single large claim has had lots of very important discussions." In the case of refineries shut down by Hurricane Katrina, insurance companies have argued they ought not to have to pay damages because the shutdowns helped drive up gas prices, and the companies made more money than they would have been if there had been no storm.
Smith conjectures that large claims are so infrequent that insurers risk little reputation capital from disputing them. Of course, in some cases, a large claim may push an insurer into insolvency, at best limiting the ability of the policyholder to recover.
So, all in all, the fact that big companies may have trouble buying insurance against catastrophic damages may be a blessing in disguise. Investors can diversify away the risks of a catastrophic event hitting one stock, so they don't reward management for buying insurance. "Equity in the capital structure is a very effective risk management mechanism," says Smith. "Debt is inherently a less flexible source of capital than equity, and the flexibility of equity is particularly valuable the more uncertainty there is in the environment."
BP understands its own operations better than any insurance company, and therefore has a comparative advantage in self-insuring catastrophic losses using its equity cushion. In 2005, a refinery explosion at BP's Texas City, Texas plant claimed 15 lives, injured 170 and reportedly led to over 1,000 lawsuits, not to mention $21 million in regulatory fines for safety violations. In March 2006, a hole in a corroded BP pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska caused a 5,000-gallon oil spill and incalculable damage to BP's brand.
Yet, BP hasn't flinched from its go-bare approach to major risks. A spokesman says, "Our approach to insurance remains essentially unchanged from the early '90s, in that we carry major risks ourselves. The size and breadth of the company--particularly in terms of geography and diversity of business streams--provide the hedging capability we believe we need. At the same time, we believe we continue to have a deeper understanding around the 'risks' of our core business--energy--over those outside the industry."
The Case of Memorial Healthcare
Faced with sharply increased premiums and cutbacks in the amount of insurance available to them, smaller companies are also sharpening their understanding of catastrophic risks and devising new approaches. Memorial Healthcare System, based in Southeast Florida, found in 2006 that it could buy less than 10 percent of the coverage previously available--yet that 10 percent would cost almost triple the previous premium. Not only did Memorial decide to go bare in 2006, it began to lay the groundwork for a captive that would allow hospitals to pool risks and finance their steeply higher deductibles.
Memorial is working with RMS, the same modeling agency that works with insurers. The three-tiered program will cover, first, the traditional deductible of 3 percent of the total insured value; then, in tier two, a loan facility of 2 percent of the total insured value; and, finally, a risk pooling arrangement in which each participant would agree to share in the other participants' risks, based on their degree of risk.
Memorial treasurer Wheatley expects to see his system's comparable premiums fall from $12.5 million to $7 or $8 million. "We're creating a mechanism that provides a significant amount of financing and liquidity, up to 7 percent of total insured value, to augment the existing resources of the hospital systems," Wheatley says. "One of the reasons that the premium is less is that we don't have the same expense load and profit requirement that property and casualty companies do. We may be able at our company to price at something very close to the pure risk level."
The model assesses the risk of each hospital participating in the program, and weights premiums accordingly. Diversification will help Memorial and other participants reap savings. So will risk reduction. In the current tight insurance market, companies in Florida and the Gulf region complain that they don't get premium discounts for agreeing to retain more risks, or even for reducing their risks by, for example, taking precautions against hurricanes.
"If you're in a certain ZIP code, it doesn't matter if you're a stick frame built in 1940 or reinforced concrete," says an executive with a Gulf Coast building company. But Wheatley says that Memorial is "hard-shelling" two of its hospital campuses so they'd be able to withstand at least a Category 3 storm, and expects to be able to factor the mitigation into its premium.
Business Resiliency
However, insurance only goes so far. Brian Jemelian, CFO of Yamaha Corp. of America, based in Buena Park, Calif., says, "We do carry business interruption insurance, which covers lost profits as a result of an interruption. What is not covered, however, is lost future business, lost market share or lost dealer shelf-space."
About five years ago, the threat of uninsurable losses led Yamaha to focus on business continuity in the event of a disaster. A business impact analysis assessed the loyalty of every one of Yamaha's customers, and concluded that while some would stick with the company despite the interruption, others would not.
Yamaha established a Corporate Emergency Response Training (CERT) program, a four-day course that 18 percent of its workforce has attended. It secured its computer equipment in a bunkered facility able to handle a severe earthquake. It designated an alternate location to work from in the event of a disaster, established an emergency management team and got divisions and manufacturing facilities on board to develop their own business continuity plans.
Although Yamaha hasn't suffered a severe business interruption, Jemelian says it has already reaped benefits from the plan. "My biggest surprise was the boost in morale that came from the CERT program," he says. "Folks were sending emails to the president saying how thankful they were. It was truly a demonstration that employees do come first."
Process improvements have resulted from the company centralizing what used to be 40 databases into one content management system accessible on the Web, from imaging records and from putting cash management functions online.
Toyota Motor Sales USA has a similar program, and Business Continuity Manager Janet Mebust, CBCP, says that "for every dollar we spend, we're saving seven dollars in recovery costs." In Hurricane Katrina, when a credit corporation office in Baton Rouge lost phone service, Toyota flew in satellite phones. When the team relocated to Houston and had trouble finding hotel space because of the flood of New Orleans residents who had been evacuated there, Toyota learned a lesson. As Hurricane Rita later veered toward Houston, the Houston employees made hotel reservations in Dallas a few days before the storm hit, so they could continue to operate at their sister office there.
Marsh's Lynch recommends that companies look at risk holistically, but focus on how the company really creates value, rather than on the specific nature of the threat. A manufacturer of flooring operates in a competitive environment, with many manufacturers. "The manufacturing process isn't what they're concerned with, because they can outsource to competitors if manufacturing fails," he says. "It's the relationships with buyers they really want to protect."
Often, companies are not aware of the risks that could shut them down. "In the U.S.," Lynch says, "50 percent of our energy is generated by fossil fuel, but 66 percent of the fossil fuel is shipped by railroad. So, the utilities are dependent on railroads, and I question their level of supply chain diligence."
Some companies have recognized that their own business continuity depends on the business continuity of suppliers. One firm with long lead times and sole-source suppliers in the area hit by Hurricane Katrina weathered the storm well because it had proactively worked with suppliers to help them develop business continuity programs, and had even sent its own team out to help the suppliers recover after the storm.
According to Lynch, the head of supply chain at the company said, "We're not in the business of funding their business continuity, but we are in the business to survive. If we don't think beyond contracts and litigation, we'll fail." In other cases, risks to suppliers have led companies to consider acquiring the suppliers, or withdrawing altogether from the businesses that depend on them.
Howard Kunreuther, professor of Decision Sciences and Business and Public Policy Co-Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, says, "Insurers are reluctant to provide the kind of coverage they have in the past, unless they have to, for example, when the state requires them to in order to do other business."
One of the most dramatic ways for companies to adapt to this fact is to simply rely on the equity base to self-insure; for large and well-capitalized firms, this may be the most financially rational strategy. For those whose debt covenants mandate insurance, and for small businesses, self-insurance may not be an option. But Robert Hartwig, chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, thinks that it's a stretch to call the current environment of high prices and limited capacity a "crisis."
From 1991-2002, U.S. property and casualty insurers weren't even able to earn their cost of capital. But they began to do so in 2003, and in 2006, net income for property and casualty insurers was a record-shattering $57 billion. "As the price goes up, there are new entrants willing to take the risk, but only when the return is sufficient. In the wake of Katrina, $10 billion was raised by startup companies writing policies or the reinsurance behind them. They put up money at very considerable risk in 2006, and it turned out for them, because nothing happened," Hartwig says.
Perhaps what lies beyond the insurance crisis may be a combination of increased supply and reduced demand for insurance, as companies respond to the current environment by various forms of self-reliance and risk mitigation. As demand and risk fall, so could rates. The worm may yet turn--the insurance business is, after all, cyclical.
Gregory J. Millman (gj.millman@earthlink.net) is a freelance writer in New Jersey and a frequent contributor to Financial Executive.
RELATED ARTICLE: takeaways
* Not only are catastrophes happening more often, they're causing more economic damage when they do. This has created predictable concerns for insurers, and for their customers.
* Huge increases in premiums and deductibles, especially in the areas hit hard by the 2005 hurricanes, have spurred quite a few companies to "go bare," or operate without insurance.
* One of the most dramatic ways for a company to adapt to the cost and scarcity of catastrophic risk insurance is to simply rely on its equity base to self-insure. BP plc is a good case in point.
Millman, Gregory J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Millman, Gregory J. "Managing catastrophic risk: getting beyond the insurance crisis; The incidence of catastrophic risk has increased markedly, and insurance rates have risen with it. Some companies are re-examining the issue of self-insurance or even doing without and using their equity base to cover potential risks." Financial Executive, Jan.-Feb. 2007, p. 28+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA158094214&it=r&asid=41964bc0d80180faf8b63d0d80d94553. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A158094214
RMS Chief Research Officer: Risk Models Move Beyond Insurance
(May 24, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 COMTEX News Network, Inc.. Comtex Scientific Corp. News Provided by Comtex.
http://www.comtexnews.com
Byline: John Weber
MIAMI BEACH, Fla., May 24, 2016, (A. M. Best via COMTEX) -- Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer, RMS, said a growing area of model use comes from governments that must determine whether their region is well protected from potential impacts of weather and other perils. Muir-Wood spoke with A.M. BestTV at the Exceedance 2016 conference.
View the video version of this interview at: http://www.ambest.com/v.asp?v=muirwood516
Following is an edited transcript of the interview.
Q: How has risk modeling for climate change evolved in recent years?
A: In a risk model we are trying to represent what are the extreme events which can happen today.
Increasingly we find you canâ??t simply assume the average of history of the last 100 years to tell you what the risk is today because the risk today is changing. We have to explore how to capture that change, how to pass it on to other clients who use our models for actually how they price and manage their risk.
A key element of this is that scientists have been pursuing what are called attribution studies for the past 10 or 15 years. There are increasing numbers of them now so that every extreme event happens, every extreme climate has, like a big flood somewhere, or a hurricane somewhere, scientists will run these attribution models. An attribution model takes the climate of the earth and it re-runs it back to about 1950, and it says, â??Imagine there had been no increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, no increase in the greenhouse gases going all the way back to 1950.â?
Imagine a parallel world, if you like, whatâ??s called a counter-factual world, where thereâ??s been no increase, and weâ??ll run that alongside the real world where there has been an increase.
Weâ??ll then run this climate we have today and this imaginary climate of the world without CO2 increase. Weâ??ll run it for maybe 50,000 simulations and see how often certain classes of extreme events turn up.
If youâ??re looking at your big flood or your big storm, you see how often that turns up between the two models. You see if thereâ??s a difference between them.
We find for some classes of hazards, especially the most convincing one is around heat waves and droughts but also around extreme rainfalls, but in fact, theyâ??re turning up more frequently in our real world as compared with the simulated world where thereâ??s been no increase in carbon dioxide.
Q: What should we know about risk transfer products when it comes to climate change?
A: We have to watch out. This is quite a difficult subject because as long as we were using history to tell us about the level of the chance of a hurricane or the chance of flood, then we have a hundred years of data or more to tell us. As we know, itâ??s changing. It becomes more difficult. The uncertainty gets bigger.
Our models are very widely used for pricing risk, for risk transfer between insurers and reinsurers, between the insureds and the insurers too. We need to be very careful as we define what is the current activity. We need to be careful to ask, â??Has it already shifted off the baseline we might otherwise get from history?â?
A lot of the time, the uncertainty in our projection may actually be even a bit bigger than our knowledge of how much it has changed. We need to show it to our clients.
We talk about our clients owning their view of risk. We need to show them all the science on this. We need to show them what is our best perspective on that risk and also what is the uncertainty around it. Because that uncertainty is also important for how they price the risk when theyâ??re doing risk transfer.
Q: Should risk modeling techniques, when it comes to climate change, be confined to the insurance industry?
A: No. These models, which are extremely widely used in the insurance industry, one theme of our meeting this week is actually that a whole new area has grown up in the last two or three years, which is called â??resilience,â? the focus on resilience, both by cities, and by states, and by countries.
Itâ??s a focus on understanding what drives risk, how can you reduce the impact of risk and how can you transfer it too. How do you balance insuring the risk, if you like, along other actions to reduce the risk, too, for resilience for a city?
Weâ??re in Miami Beach, which is right in the front line of potential hurricane impacts from wind and surge. Here they need to focus on whether climate is actually changing the occurrence of hurricanes, whether they are becoming more extreme, more frequent. They need to ask these questions too to drive their action around building sea walls or enhancing the building code. That becomes as important as all these questions about what is the price of risk for purchasing insurance or passing between an insurer and a reinsurer.
View this and other interviews at http://www.ambest.tv
(By John Weber: John.Weber@ambest.com)
Copyright (C) 2016 by A. M. Best Company, Inc.
John Weber
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"RMS Chief Research Officer: Risk Models Move Beyond Insurance." A.M. Best Newswire, 24 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453174009&it=r&asid=d3ca437f8d95bd15ce1444aa3bde8a2a. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453174009
THE CURE FOR CATASTROPHE by Robert Muir-Wood
Written by Laura Cole Published in Books
THE CURE FOR CATASTROPHE by Robert Muir-Wood
01 Jan
2017
Natural disasters are inevitable but the death toll is up to us. Such is the argument in Robert Muir-Wood’s latest, which details how our approach to disasters dictates the human loss of earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis
For earthquakes, he shows how our idea of an epicentre can give a false impression of where the most damage has happened: ‘the vibrations in an earthquake occur all along a fault rupture’, he writes, ‘not just the point from where the rupture starts’. So when news graphics of the 2015 Kathmandu earthquake appeared, they focused on the epicentre 60 miles east of the city. The approach ignored the fault line running through the capital towards Everest, where the aftershocks occurred.
For tsunamis, he looks at how our misguided trust in buildings can have deadly consequences. A whole school in Kamaishi, Japan was saved from the 2011 tsunami thanks to the teachings of a ‘maverick’ professor who taught them to get to higher ground. The ‘miracle of Kamaishi’ makes a sobering comparison to the death toll along the coast. Meanwhile, for hurricanes, Muir-Wood examines how the flood walls around New Orleans had been built to match the height of preceding floods, not for a freak event of the future. The presumed safety of the walls had also attracted more property development in the area. He explores the question ‘does having a flood wall increase the numbers drowned?’ Time to forget everything you thought you knew about disaster prevention.
With a warmer climate predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of tropical storms, Muir-Wood’s critical thinking couldn’t have better timing. In its correction of common myths and challenge to the natural disaster status quo, this is a vital read.