17 August 2022
Wendy Walford provides an update.
The last Sustainability board of the session was held in July, I want to highlight three important topics that we covered in that meeting:
Climate Science
Sir David King from the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) presented to theBoard on the climate crisis. We heard about the rapidly evolving impacts from GHG emissions on the Arctic, and how these effects are emerging much faster than previously thought. In particular how changes to the Arctic are distorting the jet stream, which is the reason why we are seeing so many weather extremes, such as colder weather (snow in Texas!) and heatwaves (40C in the UK!).
We also discussed some of the possible interventions that aim to buy some time to enable the rapid decrease in GHG emissions that are needed to reduce the risks of an irreversible tipping point being met.
Other interventions include potential ocean based carbon sequestrations that might be possible. We learnt about the importance of whale poo in supporting marine biomass regeneration and the opportunity to sequester Co2 at scale as a side-benefit.
The Sustainability Board looks forward to further collaboration with CCAG and the Centre for Climate Repair.
Chair's review
As the end of Sandy’s term as chair of the Sustainability board approaches, he provided an assessment of that year’s progress. In terms of overall progress, there has been more than we expected to achieve or had a right to expect given the volunteer status of the Board but less than we had hoped for. The Board has delivered well against its purpose of meaningful engagement across actuarial stakeholders and being centre of expertise/leadership for IFOA.
Sandy had a huge thank you to everyone for fitting this into their busy professional lives and approaching this with such energy, enthusiasm and commitment.
Good byes to Nick (thank you for this 6 years on Board including as Chair) and to Bob (thank you to his hard work putting in place a structured process for practical guides)
Selected highlights across portfolios were:
- Board liaisons – There has been activity across all IFOA Boards who are now up and running on climate for their portfolio areas.
- Regulation and policy – driving consultation responses (averaging out at over 1 response every 2 months), presenting at Select Committee on Biodiversity, range of broader interaction with regulators and initiatives, refresh of the climate risk alert
- Research – there is now a structured programme of research with 12 projects. See below for more details
- Events – There is good structure and a clear plan on events with good penetration, examples include the number of sustainability workshops at the 2022 conference and the range of high profile external speakers.
- Practical Guides – continue to progress and publish these, refreshing previous guides (eg DC Pensions) and publishing new areas (Risk and Finance and Investment due in September)
- Communities – there has been great progress on Sustainable Volunteer Group, the regular newsletter, ECB and local society talks.
- Education – The focus has now moved from changes to the actuarial syllabus to focusing on senior actuaries, for example working with practice boards on developing professionalism skills videos focusing on climate change in actuarial work
- SDGs – Continues to develop content to support actuaries with the sustainability development goals, through podcasts and the curated library.
Launch of research programme
We were delighted to hear how 11 new research groups are now running and briefing sessions with all the chairs have taken place. The groups will be working through both an exciting range of topics that will help actuaries understand the role that climate will have on our work. The working groups are encouraged to release blogs, podcasts and more to present their findings, so keep an eye out for their insights.
Find out more about Sustainability Board activities
Find out more about our Sustainability lifelong learning resources