Page 23 - Demo

cu | What are some emerging
issues you see for risk managers
in the future?
Aging infrastructure. It’s been added on to the World Economic Forum’s annual global risk report. It’s not a problem that’s isolated to any specific country or region. It is a global systemic problem. Infrastructure grew after the Second World War, when we put some of these systems into place,
and we continued to build into the 80s and 90s and 2000s. We have pulled back on funding the maintenance of these systems, and now we are at a point when we have crumbling infrastructure un- derground. Our sewers and waterlines are starting to degrade. We’ve got electrical grid systems that are hanging by a thread and almost obsolete. A technology-based future requires sustaining power in a new urban environment.
cu | This ties in with a second emerging issue you have mentioned... Yes, climate change and adaptation. As we have built communities, we have taken away green space, which is Mother Nature’s flood mitigation system. The infrastructure we currently have is
not able to manage those 5-year, 10-year or 20-
year events. We’re not prepared to deal with the aging infrastructure that we have, and the climate around us is continuing to change. We are presently experiencing two things in Alberta: fire issues in the north, and water issues. It’s either super-dry or moisture-rich in Alberta. We’re starting to have a conflict with Nature. We need to do a better job of taking care of the Nature. And most of the infra- structure that we build has to be resilient to those changes, too.
cu | How does climate change
affect a risk manager?
The effect depends upon the certain discipline of risk you are in. If you are an insurance risk person, and that’s specifically what you deal with, you have to be incredibly mindful of your asset inventory, your total insured value, and any exclusions you
may have on your insurance policies. If there is one of those 20- or 50- or 100-year flooding events that affect your organization’s property, you need to have the terms and conditions to be able to deal with that.
From a mitigation perspective, you need to have conversations internally with stakeholders. Take an engineering group, for example. You might say to them, ‘Look, we’re not going to get $100 million in new funding, that’s not going to happen. But let’s talk about resiliency.’ There are flood mitigation systems that, for a small investment, can certainly protect high-value assets. Especially where there are things like inventory or electrical systems. We can make minor adaptations while decision-makers someplace else are trying to figure that big systemic funding problem.
cu | What skills are valuable to future risk managers when dealing with these kinds of emerging issues?
One valuable skill set is problem-solving. I think the perception is that risk managers just buy insurance, but now we have to become problem-solvers. And it’s not just problem-solving for aging infrastructure and climate change adaptation. How do we help
an organization meet its objectives? The objectives could be, ‘How do we integrate more options for transportation solutions? How do we increase the social well-being of communities?’ Or they could also include increased workflow integration, if you are delivering a product or service, or advancing your environmental image, if you are resource extraction agency. Helping to problem-solve is going to be one of the skillsets for a risk manager of the future.
cu | Can you elaborate on what the risk manager of the future will look like? We are risk managers, we’re not risk avoiders. Ev- erything is changing around us. We cannot be the merchants of ‘no.’ We cannot tell our organizations that we cannot do something. We have to work with our organizations and stakeholders to help every- body find the right ‘yes.’
canadianunderwriter.ca | September 2019 23