The Sustainability Research and Thought Leadership Sub-committee has oversight of all the working parties listed below and encourages them to undertake research that can be shared with Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) members via sessional papers, articles in The Actuary or the British Actuarial Journal (BAJ), and presentations at conferences and workshops.
The Committee currently has the following research working parties exploring the following topics:
- Biodiversity
- Net-zero and the implications for investment portfolios
The following are new areas of research to be set-up:
- Climate assumptions and scenario modelling
- Demographics – mortality and morbidity
- Climate change disclosures
- Carbon pricing
- Role of the Sovereign
- Effect of climate change on long-term interest rates
- Managing sustainability in the absence of metrics and measurement
- Private, public, and universal ownership
- Asset management
- Inequality of climate change
The Sustainability Board has commissioned a series of working parties to prepare practical guides to support actuaries who are considering how to appropriately include sustainability matters into their work.
The committee also has links to several working parties led by other practice areas.
If you have your own ideas for member-led research you would like to pursue, please refer to our Guidance for Research Working Parties or contact the IFoA Communities team.
Members interested in volunteering for a research working party should check Volunteer vacancies for current and new working parties.
The Sustainability Research and Thought Leadership Sub-committee collaborates with external researchers who are studying relevant topics.
The IFoA is also actively involved in commissioning strategic and external research relating to Sustainability.
Information on research undertaken by universities and other external agencies which receive funding and/or support from the IFoA, as well as the IFoA’s strategy for involvement, the process for calls for research, current research initiatives and funding, can be found in Research and Knowledge.
Related documents
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Guidance for Member-Led Research Working Parties
9 November 2017
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Contact Details
For more information about Sustainability working parties contact the Communities Team
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Events calendar
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Climate Solvency The Actuaries Carbon Collaboration: Applying Actuarial Concepts to Carbon Emissions
6 July 2022The Actuaries’ Carbon Collaboration (ACC) is a group of actuaries and other professionals working towards a coherent understanding of the issues around greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by considering them in an actuarial context.
Emissions into and absorption from the atmosphere can be modelled in the same way that we model variable cash flows, including the impacts of uncertain quantities and timing. The ACC’s work investigates both the insights that this analogy provides and its limitations.
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Sessional Meeting: Data and Modelling Considerations for mental health in life insurance
11 July 2022This talk presents the work of the Data and Modelling workstream of the IFoA Mental Health Working Party. We explore data and modelling considerations in the risk assessment and underwriting of mental health conditions. We will also consider how newer risk factors and improved data availability might open up opportunities for additional underwriting and product designs.
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Pensions Dashboards
12 July 2022As the industry prepares for Pensions Dashboards, we have lined up a specialist panel who is at the heart of the ongoing work in this area. Hear the latest developments, future proposals and have the opportunity to put forward your questions to our speakers.
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Crisis Management and Boards
18 July 2022Crisis management, the process by which an organization deals with a disruptive, sudden and unexpected event that threatens to harm the organization or its stakeholders, has become a key concern in the light of the Pandemic and Geopolitical risks.
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Applying AI – From Concept to Practice
19 July 2022Artificial Intelligence is heralded as a game-changer to the ways industries use data, with the insurance industry especially looking to embrace these new technologies. This brings many questions – not least around data privacy, ethics, potential biases and so on – with regulators increasingly interested in developments.
Moreover, whilst the stunning progress of specific technologies such as Watson and Alphazero made headlines some years ago, current commercial applications of AI remain far from mature.
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This webinar will cover:
• Some background on the risks of misselling in an ESG context, including the DWS case
• Achieving positive impact is a strong antidote to the risks of greenwashing or ESG misselling, however this risks having a tension with fiduciary responsibilities
• This tension can be resolved with a concept called Universal Ownership
• Under Universal ownership, investors have an appetite to make a loss in order to achieve positive impact, and yet still have no compromise on their fiduciary responsibilities
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This session will focus on the transformation roadmap of the healthcare sector in KSA and the role of actuarial capabilities in enhancing its evolution to the desired end stage as per the objectives of the Vision 2030. The discussion will focus how the system has evolved so far and shed light on the expected future changes. Through examining the transformation, we will highlight how the sector is and can use actuarial expertise to not only assist with this transformation but also use basic actuarial principles to identify the key risks and their respective mitigation strategies.
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Sessional Meeting: Covid-19 and the Effectiveness of ERM Frameworks
Online15 August 2022The purpose of this research paper is to explore enterprise risk management lessons which can be learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic in preparation for potential future pandemics as well as other “gray rhino” or “black swan” events. This paper is not intended to be an all-encompassing solution to the issues presented by Covid-19; rather, the content has been provided to help drive discussions regarding how risk management processes may need to evolve in line with the dynamic nature of the underlying risks that they sometimes need to capture.
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The IFoA's Infrastructure Working Party, led by Chris Lewin, will present its new introductory guide to infrastructure investment, which will be published on the IFoA web-site prior to the webinar. Those readers whose institutions have already taken the plunge into infrastructure will know that it is a highly complex and diverse field of activity. This guide does not explore all the matters which investors take into account, but it does discuss many of the more important points, including the risks and past returns, benchmarking, and ESG and SDG considerations. Attendees will be invi
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Health – Our Greatest Asset
2 November 2022Health contributes to happiness at the personal, family, community and societal level. Health, importantly underpins all our economic security. This talk will explore the drivers of our health, the measurement of health and the steps we can take to improve health – most of which lie outside the NHS.