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Covid-19, outcome bias and the impact on actuarial analysis.
21 September 2020
In the first of a series of six blogs, Gordon Woo, catastrophist at RMS, Will Davies, chief actuary at Insurem, Matt Attard, senior analyst at Marsh analytic solutions and Sophie Weisenberger, senior consultant at RPC Tyche, consider outcome bias and its impact on actuarial analysis in the context of COVID-19. They are part of G19, one of the workstreams of the IFoA’s Covid-19 Action Taskforce
Cross-practice climate change working party
16 September 2020
The Health and Care Board and Sustainability Board are jointly launching a new short-term (six months) working party to produce a short paper to identify climate change issues and their implications relevant to H&C actuaries and recommend topics that where further in-depth research should be carried out.
This is a short term working party and the timing of meetings will be established at a first meeting. Meetings will be by conference call to allow us to widen this opportunity to all members. There will be no requirement for volunteers to meet in one place.
COVID-19 and pandemic response unemployment
16 September 2020
COVID-19 is causing a severe economic recession in the United Kingdom (UK) due to unprecedented government interventions to control the virus that was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020 . In this bulletin Scott Reid, John Ng, Dr Chris Martin and Josephine Robertson focus on UK unemployment forecasts where the working group have provided an application using R-Shiny to enable actuaries to consider a range of expert opinions and functionality to create custom scenarios. The code for this is open access.
Net-zero Emissions: What are Governments and Companies Doing?
16 September 2020
To achieve the Paris Agreement objective of limiting global warming to well below 2ºC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that it is necessary for us to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Governments and organisations are setting targets to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (or earlier).
In this paper, members of the Actuaries Institute (Australia)’s Climate Change Working Group discuss the actions that are being taken around the world and domestically to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
Importance of Climate-Related Risks for Actuaries
16 September 2020
Importance of Climate Related Risks for Actuaries by the IAA is the first of a planned series of papers that aim to create awareness and promote actuarial approaches in climate-related risk management and reporting. It discusses the main components of the climate-related risks relevant to actuaries, their implications, and the importance of climate-related risk to each category of actuarial work.
CMI notes recent deaths remain close to 2019 levels, despite volatile weekly data
15 September 2020
During the coronavirus pandemic, the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) is publishing frequent UK mortality analysis through its mortality monitor. The latest update covers weeks 33 to 36 of 2020 (8 August to 4 September) based on provisional England & Wales deaths data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 15 September 2020.
The key points of this update are:
The Minsky Moment of Fallen Angels Risk
15 September 2020
Lawrence Habahbeh, Chair of the Resource & Environment MIG, and member of the COVID-19 action task force on Enterprise risk management and Investment impact for Life and Annuity Insurers, discusses the economic impacts of COVID-19 which demonstrate that, once again, Professor Hyman P. Minsky, who long argued that markets were crisis prone, is likely to be proved correct.
Meet Mukami Njeru: the first Kenyan woman to qualify as an actuary
14 September 2020
Mukami Njeru has been elected to IFoA council and was the first woman in Kenya to become a qualified actuary. We asked her about lockdown, studying and female representation.
How has lockdown been for you?
Paying it forward – with the IFoA exams team
14 September 2020
After passing her last written exam Canadian based IFoA Fellow Tanwi Kulkarni started missing the feeling of being in touch with her books and learning resources.
In this blog, Tanwi reflects on why she decided to experience the other side of the table and volunteer to take on both Exam Test Candidate 1 and Marker roles.
Why did I get involved?
Communicating actuarial concepts with real-world examples from the COVID-19 pandemic
9 September 2020
Andrea Munley, GI Actuary, with input from within the COVID-19 workstream, demonstrates how real-life examples from the COVID-19 pandemic can be used to bring actuarial concepts to life in a simple way for a wide and diverse range of audiences