Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer, RMS
Muir-Wood heads the branch of RMS responsible for enhancing approaches to natural catastrophe modelling and developing models for new areas of risk such as liability. A regular speaker and prolific writer, he has most recently focused on the clustering of catastrophic events, insurance loss amplification, and financial and social impact of mega catastrophes. He is vice chair of an OECD board on the financial management of catastrophes and a member of the climate risk and insurance working group for the Geneva Association.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
The topic of catastrophe risk is never dull! Trying to capture the complexity and variability of catastrophes in a model provides a never ending set of challenges: every big event teaches us something new, and modellers are always needing to ensure there is no "over steering" in response to the latest catastrophe. A key motivation for me right now is identifying new applications for catastrophe modelling, such as to help disaster risk reduction.
What will be the next big development in risk management?
We are about to see a big expansion of catastrophe modelling beyond the world of insurance. The new UN Sendai Declaration on disasters, agreed and signed by 187 countries, calls for disaster-risk informed investments to become standard throughout the economy. Risk modelling will be needed to quantify the risk and identify the actions that can most cost effectively reduce it. Ensuring that disaster risk is properly priced into all investments will be a requisite. Governments will need to square their commitments in this area with running subsidised catastrophe pools; and there will be opportunities for "resilience brokers", paid by governments, to identify the most cost effective way to reduce risk, not just transfer it.
Who or what has inspired your work?
Most certainly the people who manage to combine science with an entrepreneurial approach to evaluating risk. For example, the founder of catastrophe modelling was Don Friedman, a meteorologist working at the Travelers Research Center back in 1972. Haresh Shah at Stanford University, with his brilliant research student Weimin Dong, created the original earthquake catastrophe model. There are also many other scientists whose passion for their research has been and is inspiring: whether it is Kerry Emanuel of MIT on hurricanes or Roger Bilham of Colorado State on earthquakes.
Who do you most admire in the field of risk management?
Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School who, for many years, has been a key thought leader around the potential for incentivising action through correctly pricing risk. The Nobel prize-winning Daniel Kahneman, author of 'Thinking Fast and Slow', has shared brilliant insights into the psychology of judgement of how people make decisions around risk. There is also a long list of people I have collaborated with over the years: the energy of Hemant Shah, co-founder of RMS, Gordon Woo with whom I have been debating vigorously for more than 30 years, and Andrew Coburn and his visual imagination for communicating around new areas of risk assessment.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to emulate your success?
Go out and see what happens on the ground following a catastrophe – you will always learn something surprising. Keep an open mind and sceptical attitude about the way in which we attempt to rationalise the world in models.
What have you learnt about communicating risk?
Risk management and catastrophes are complex and highly technical subjects, which can be delivered with more impact in the form of a story. To help your audience more easily understand and connect with your message keep your story simple, illustrative, and provide analogies and contrasting images to bring the story to life. Finding the right descriptive words that resonate with technical and non-technical audiences is a must. Right now, I am searching for the best words to describe creating the set of potential catastrophes in a probabilistic model – the 'synthetic history', 'the universe of all possible events', 'the set of realisations'?
What are your other interests?
My passions are writing, travelling, hiking and skiing in the mountains, singing in a London choir, and spending time with my family. My two most recent holidays have both been 'writing retreats', and I have a book on the history of the quest to thwart disasters due for publication in 2016.