I’ve just returned from the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting in New York. Every September, political, corporate, and non-profit leaders from around the world gather to discuss pressing challenges, form partnerships, and make commitments to action. It was inspiring to see the tremendous work already being done and the new commitments being made to address a diverse and wide range of issues, from containing the Ebola epidemic, to increasing access to education, to combatting climate change, and helping Haiti develop a self-sustaining economy.
One prevailing theme at the event this year was the importance of cross-sector partnerships to successfully tackle such complex issues. Not surprisingly, data crunched by the CGI team on commitments made over the past 10 years demonstrates the highest rate of success from partnerships vs. go-it-alone approaches.
In this spirit, we announced an RMS commitment last week to partner with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative to help increase the resilience of cities around the world. We will be making our catastrophe models available to cities in the 100RC network so that they can better understand their exposures, assess risk to catastrophic events as well as climate change, and prioritize investments in mitigating and managing that risk.
As the saying goes, “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” From our 25 years of experience helping the insurance industry better measure and then manage catastrophe risk, we believe there is a largely untapped opportunity for the public sector to similarly leverage exposure management and catastrophe modeling technology to establish more informed policies for managing risk and increasing resilience in cities throughout the world, both in developed and emerging economies.
It was also clear this week that the conversation in corporate boardrooms is increasingly moving from being focused solely on the financial bottom line to also having a positive impact on the world in a way that is strategically aligned with the core mission of the business.
Our partnership with 100RC, along with the partnerships with the UNISDR and the World Bank that we announced this summer, is another step in our own version of this journey. Through both our direct philanthropic support of Build Change and their admirable work to improve construction practices in developing countries and through the leveraging of our technology and the expertise of our colleagues to help the public sector, we are aligning all of our activities in support of our core mission to increase the resilience of our society.
Many of our clients have shared with us that they are on similar journeys, building on traditional support for local organizations to implement more strategic programs with broader impact and employee engagement. In particular, the insurance industry is uniquely positioned to understand the value of proactively investing in mitigation and in increasing resilience, instead of waiting until a tragedy has occurred and all that can be done is to support humanitarian response efforts.
With this common frame of reference, we look forward to increasingly partnering with our clients in the coming years not just to help them manage their own risk but to collectively help increase resilience around the world.
