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Ever since my colleagues and I started RMS 25 years ago at Stanford University, we’ve been motivated to make the world a safer and more resilient place. This mission-driven approach has been our passion and a part of RMS culture since the beginning.

Over the years we have made numerous contributions in myriad ways. Today we announced an exciting partnership with the Risky Business initiative to work toward our shared goal of enabling the world to better understand and manage the risks associated with climate change.

Risky Business, a joint initiative of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Office of Hank Paulson, and Next Generation, launched in October 2013 to quantify and publicize the economic risks that the United States faces as a result of climate change.

The initiative has two core components:

  • Assessing the economic risk of climate change in the United States
  • Engaging communities most at risk, to help community leaders prepare a measured response to the risks that they face

RMS is a Risky Business content partner, and our modelers and analysts are incorporating peer-reviewed climate change science into the RMS U.S. hurricane and coastal flooding models to quantify the economic risks associated with the uncertainties in climate change.

Our team, led by Dr. Paul Wilson, created an ensemble of stochastic event sets that reflect a range of possible sea level and oceanic conditions for each of the coming decades. The results of our work with Risky Business will be included in a report on the economic impacts of climate change in the United States later this year.

While there are uncertainties regarding the impact of climate change, the risks are real and can be quantified using the big compute technologies now at our fingertips and by systematically applying a scientific approach in addressing climate change issues. By objectively measuring this risk, we can—as a society—start to manage it.

I’m proud of the work my colleagues are doing every day to create models and software that enable key business sectors around the world to quantify and manage risk with the ultimate goal of increasing resiliency.

It is through work such as this that we live the mission of our company every day, as we strive to create a more resilient world. I look forward to updating you on our progress in coming months and sharing the results of our work with Risky Business.

In the meantime, if you want to find out more about the initiative and RMS’ involvement, check out this TIME magazine article.

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September 24, 2015
Reflections from Rendezvous: Innovation to Drive Growth in the Global (Re)Insurance Industry

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Hemant Shah
Hemant Shah
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, RMS

Since co-founding RMS in 1989 as a spin-out from Stanford University, Hemant Shah helped build RMS from five colleagues working from his apartment to more than 1,000 professionals providing the world's leading catastrophe modeling solutions to the global insurance and financial services sector. He is widely recognized within the global risk industry as a proactive and influential leader, and has been named “Most Admired CEO” (San Francisco Business Times, 2014); one of the "100 Most Powerful People in the Insurance Industry"(Insurance Newscast, 2005–2011); "Most Influential Person of the Year" (Reactions Global Awards, 2011); and one of the "Top 40 Most Influential" (Global Reinsurance, 2008), among other accolades. Hemant serves on the board of directors of the Casualty Actuarial Society and Praedicat, Inc., as well as on the board of overseers of St. John's School of Risk Management and Actuarial Science (College of Insurance). He is a Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Terrorism Risk Management Policy, a Director on the board of RAND's Institute for Civil Justice, and a Director of the Singapore-based Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies. Hemant is also a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, and part of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

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