3 October 2013 News

Willis funds climate change Antarctica expedition

Broker Willis is sponsoring a scientific programme in Antarctica from November 2013 to January 2014 to better understand our changing climate and build resilience to weather-related risk.

The Willis Resilience Expedition will undertake three scientific research projects focused on how the climate is changing in Antarctica, a region which provides an important signal for the rate and scale of global environmental changes.

The expedition will be led by Parker Liautaud, a 19-year old polar explorer, student of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale and respected international climate science campaigner.

The scientific expedition will test an automatic weather station, a light and relatively inexpensive model that could pave the way for extensive surface observations in the Antarctic region; undertake a ‘coast-to-pole-to-coast’ survey of Antarctic stable isotope trends; and conduct a transcontinental study of the deposition rate of Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, across Antarctica. This final task will help better understand the global water cycle, which is intrinsically linked to changes in climate.

Rowan Douglas, chairman of the Willis Research Network and a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology said: “I am delighted that Willis is supporting this core science and fundamental earth observation project in the Antarctic. It is the first time that a financial institution has led the support of a major survey in the South Pole. These new isotope transects will shed important new light on the dynamics of Antarctic climate change in recent decades while the testing of new resilient, efficient and automatic weather station will provide an economic solution to the challenge of monitoring future climate conditions.

“We need to model the insurance industry's exposure to climate related risk to fulfil the stringent requirements of financial regulation. We hope that the Willis Resilience Expedition's science and survey programme will provide scientists with important data to inform their models which, in turn, provide inputs to our own systems to estimate the risk of extreme events. The Antarctic is the canary in the cage for the pace and thresholds for wider global processes and impacts.”

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