Actuaries are well used to managing long-term risks by using data on the events of the past to calculate approaches to the challenges of the future.

A new report by The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) looks at how these risk management techniques can be used in the fight against climate change.

Whilst scientists focus on making predictions that are as accurate as possible, actuaries take a different approach and are often instead concerned with predicting low-probability but high-impact scenarios, such as those caused by unlikely risk events sometimes referred to as tail risks.

The IFoA argues that these complex and poorly understood tail risks are too often side lined in policy formulation and hopes to better inform debate on how best to mitigate the risks of climate breakdown as well as applying risk-management to the wider climate change problem.

The report itself is well worth a read and serves as a great example of how the skills of professions outside of the scientific community can provide valuable contributions to the fight against a climate emergency that threatens us all.