ESG Initiative News

September 17, 2020 James Ballot,  Senior Advisor, Strategic Communications, Triple-I This post originally appeared on September 15th, 2020 on the Insurance Information Institute's blog. From Friday, September 11 to Sunday, September 13, the third annual the Hack-for-Resilience competition (“H4R”) was hosted by Wharton Risk Center and the Insurance Information Institute’s (“Triple-I”) Resilience Accelerator as part of the PennAppsXXI…Read More

September 15, 2020 Carolyn Kousky and Carlos Martin This blog post originally appeared as an Op-Ed in The Hill on August 31, 2020. Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in western Louisiana and eastern Texas Thursday morning, leaving yet-to-be counted damage and despair in its wake. As…Read More

September 11, 2020 Amanda Geiser, Josh Lewis and Deborah Small Josh Lewis was a 2019 Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellow and received grant funding for this research prior to graduating. COVID-19 has disrupted nearly every aspect of daily life and captured the world’s attention. Governments, nonprofits, and individuals have directed…Read More

August 27, 2020 Howard Kunreuther and Erin St. Peter Recent wildfires still raging in California have been caused by what some experts deem an unprecedented volume and pattern of almost 300 lightning strikes in contrast to nearly 90% of U.S. wildfires that are caused by equipment sources (e.g., utility wires)…Read More

August 26, 2020 Reihane Boghrati Dr. Boghrati has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Wharton Risk Center for the past two years. Her research focuses on extracting psychological phenomena from text. To do this she uses advance machine learning and natural language processing techniques to study behavioral constructs. In a…Read More

August 17, 2020 Carolyn Kousky and Andy Read This article originally appeared on BRINK on July 30, 2020. The impacts of COVID-19 on individuals, communities and insurers are continuing to unfold and no doubt present uncertainty. However, the current disruption also serves to highlight the importance of lessening reliance on…Read More

August 13, 2020 This piece was first published in Svenska Dagbladet on July 25, 2020 and on August 7, 2020 on the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy's blog. It is reprinted with permission. Arthur van Benthem, Gustav Engström, Johan Gars, Niko Jaakkola, Therese Lindahl, and Daniel Spiro.   During this spring the governments of many countries…Read More

August 4th, 2020 Natural disasters and health related emergencies can cause significant economic and fiscal shocks for countries. Immediately after a catastrophic event, many countries receive short-term humanitarian assistance; and often they will also receive international financial aid for longer-term rebuilding.  But countries can struggle to fund the interim period,…Read More