Climate change curated library

This climate change reading list is brought to you by the Sustainability Board. It gives suggestions for reading, with some brief commentary to help contextualise the items suggested. This is part of the IFoA's commitment to support actuaries in their understanding of climate risks and opportunities, and to encourage the incorporation of these risks and opportunities into actuarial advice. I hope you find it useful.

Nick Spencer, Chair of the Sustainability Board

Introduction

The wider horizons climate change reading list guide aims to support actuaries in their self-directed learning in an area in which they may have modest prior knowledge and insights. We assume that actuaries have some awareness of the risks that climate change presents and that they need little incentive to explore the relevance of the issue to their professional work. Further, on occasion they may need to persuade their employer/client of its importance.

This guide is part of a wider project to produce such guides in a number of topic areas. The Steering Group for the project has chosen climate change as the first topic to be addressed. Topics under consideration for future guides include systems thinking and new economics.

We welcome and encourage feedback on what you find helpful and not so helpful about this guide, as well as suggestions for material to include in future versions. We intend that this guide will be reviewed and updated regularly.

The reading list guide I wrote is meant to help actuaries “help their clients before their clients ask”. Climate change is the biggest actuarial business opportunity of the decade!!

Mike Clark

Objective

This guide curates links to a range of material each with a brief description to help the reader decide whether the linked material is relevant to their current stage of research and learning.

Climate change is an extensive subject and many of the items referenced in this guide will have further references that can be explored as the reader decides. An immense amount of work is taking place in this area. This means that the references included in this guide will soon be followed by yet-to-be published work. It is hoped that by using this guide, the reader will then be able to follow more recent developments in their areas of interest.

In some sections we have included a suggestion for a link you might like to start with, labelled Editor’s choice.

Structure

The wider horizons climate change reading list guide includes ten sections which are available to view individually on our web pages or download as a PDF: