Managing Risk in an Uncertain Climate: A Reinsurer’s Perspective
John Coomber, Retired Chief Executive Officer, Swiss Re Group

John Mutter: Welcome, or welcome back, to the State of the Planet Conference. Because I know that there are a number of people who have joined us today who were not here yesterday, I'm going to make a few remarks about how the conference is running, and will run, that for those of you who were here yesterday may be a little bit repetitive. I apologize for that.

This is the fourth of our State of the Planet conferences. This year the theme is asking the question is sustainable development feasible? And we have four panels that will address that different perspectives. Two have happened already. Today will begin with a keynote speech, followed by a panel, led by a moderator, not me, and in the afternoon the same thing will happen. And at the end of the day there will be a concluding panel that combines members of different panels from throughout the conference. That will be moderated by John Rennie who is Executive Editor of Scientific American.

So let me give you a couple of housekeeping small things. Restrooms are just outside that set of doors right there. There will be breaks that will allow you to use them. There is an information center located in the lobby if you need that. And please, if you would, turn off cell phones, buzzers, beepers, Blackberries, etcetera, anything that makes those jaunty little sounds that are so annoying to everybody. I know what happened yesterday was that people must've turned on their cell phones at lunchtime and forgot to turn them back off afterwards, so I'll remind you again shortly after lunch.

My name is John Mutter. I am Deputy Director of the Earth Institute, but for this conference I'm Chair of the Steering Committee that put this conference together. And I'd like acknowledge the Steering Committee, Charles Alexander, writer for Time magazine, former writer, and from Europe Wolfgang Kinselbach, Marco Mazzotti and yesterday, I apologize, I forgot to include Tim Palmer who's a member of the Steering Committee, but was also a speaker. So I forgot to do it in that context. Of our own people Paul Brandt-Rauf, Glenn-Marie Lange, Cheryl Palm, Elliott Sclar, Peter Schlosser, and Shahid Naeem. Okay, I'd like to thank all of those people who helped us put this together. I'd also like to thank the New York Academy of Sciences for their participation, and Scientific American similarly.

Now, in order to get the morning rolling I'd like to bring to the stage Jeffrey Sachs, who has been on the stage several times before. I'm not going to read an extensive bio for Jeff. It's in your package. Most importantly he is of course Professor here at the University, together with Director of the Earth Institute, and Special Advisor to Koffi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals. He will introduce the keynote speaker for the morning. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeffrey Sachs: Thanks a lot, John, and good morning everybody, welcome to the second day.

Today we're going to be starting off with considerations of how market forces can be mobilized to address sustainable development. This is extremely important because market forces are, as everybody knows, very powerful tools for mass scalability of solutions. Of course we rely on that for private goods, and the market economy is unequaled in its ability to marshal private economic activity. We're going to explore today whether market forces can also be marshaled for public goods as well, or whether market forces can be tweaked and utilized in ways to harmonize private and public interests suitably defined. It's a complicated topic. We have a number of leaders in this area, a number of very powerful speakers, so it'll be a very exciting session. The Wall Street Journal was very kind to us in introducing this morning's session with some interesting stories today on exactly this question. One story on the Chinese government adopting market instruments for its pollution control and environmental policies. This is part of the Party Congress that just concluded, and in the Party Congress there was a great emphasis indeed put on environmental matters by the Chinese leadership. There's also quite a fascinating story on the second page of the Wall Street Journal which I commend to you called “The CEO as Global Corporate Ambassador.” And it's kind of an interview and description of the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, Mr. A. G. Lafley, the Proctor and Gamble CEO. It says, “He doesn't talk much about shareholders, instead he talks about stakeholders,” and it talks about the fact that these stakeholders add together the company's employees, the retailers, the distributors, the wholesalers, its suppliers, the employees of those retailers, wholesales and distributors, the two and a half billion people who consumer P&G products and yes, the people who happen to own stock as well, they're part of the stakeholders. And it's a discussion which is right at the core of what we've been discussing yesterday and what we'll be discussing today, what are market forces these days? Because the market is not simply in some simple minded way maximizing shareholder value. If you take that injunction of simple mindedly maximizing shareholder value you end up in jail these days because that's really what the Enron trial is about. If without restraint you think that the goal is every quarter to present results to maximize shareholder value you end up without a company at all, and you end up without results. And what Mr. Lafley says at the end, he says, “This is not an exercise of choice, speaking about stakeholders, it's a requirement of the job. Like it or not, we are in a global economy and a global political world. Honest to God, the responsibility is huge.” And it's quite an interesting insight into the life of a CEO of a major company right now, because the idea that anybody can respond to quote market forces begs a lot of questions to begin with of exactly what are those forces, how do they operate in today's world, what is the role of corporate social responsibility, the global compact, corporate philanthropy, corporate promotion of good science, public understanding, corporate advocacy, and so on. These are very, very important questions that we'll be taking up this morning.

It's fitting therefore that we start with a corporate leader, a leader of one of the most important sectors of the economy, the financial sector, and a gentleman who led one of the most important financial sector firms in the world, Swiss Re. John Coomber was CEO of Swiss Re from 2003 to 2005, and has been with Swiss Re, and now is on the Board of Swiss Re for thirty-three years. He's a leader in the insurance industry. The insurance industry is a key part of course of the world economy, but it's also a key part of the challenge of sustainable development, because the risks we're talking about either are or are not insurable risks, and to the extent that they're not this poses huge and fundamental questions for the workings of the economy. So the last time that I had the pleasure to be together with John was at the American Museum of Natural History a few months ago when Swiss Re was unveiling a wonderful report that it sponsored and helped to put together with Dr. Paul Epstein, who's somewhere here. Paul, where are you? There you are. A report called “Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions.” And this was a report that Swiss Re sponsored on the economics, ecological implications, and financial market and insurance market implications of climate change. Climate change has been right in the sights of Swiss Re for years under John's leadership, because you have to have it there, partly as a corporate ambassador, partly as education for the world, and of course certainly as a core bottom line of the insurance industry. So the notion of CEO as global corporate ambassador could not hold more true for the gentleman that it's my pleasure to introduce now, John Coomber.

John Coomber: Jeffrey, thank you very much indeed for that kind introduction. I thought for a moment I was going to be let out of the hall before I made any remarks, and I'm actually very pleased to be standing here.

It's actually a great pleasure and a privilege for me to be invited to address this conference, and I'm especially privileged to share a platform with Jeffrey whose leadership on this subject is nothing less than inspirational, and I'm very delighted to be here with him today.

Now, I am not a scientist, that is going to become reasonably clear in the next thirty minutes. And I feel a little inadequate after the very excellent presentations we had yesterday. But what I am going to try and do is talk about the subject of sustainability from the perspective of a profit mode of business. Yes, we have many stakeholders, but actually our influence in the world is rather trivial if we don't sometimes make a profit and keep some of our shareholders happy.

And then I'm going to talk about risk, but I must respond first to one or two remarks that were made yesterday. And Tim Palmer talked about the executive decision making process. And he used the word “chaotic” in his analysis. Well, Tim how do you know, how did you get it right first time? I've introduced my reasonable share of chaos into the world as the CEO of Swiss Re, but I would say that business leaders have to take a lot of decisions, and we should remember that, and the process for taking decisions. And we can't get them all right. So part of the process is tracking the decision, monitoring its progress, building on those which are successful, and finding a way to terminate quickly those that don't work very well. So don't be anxious that not every decision made by business is one that you support. If they're right it will come good, if they're wrong they'll change it.

I'm going to talk about risk, financing and managing risk. What do you do, what do I do, when we're confronted by a risk? I would say there are five steps we all go through, consciously or unconsciously. First of all there's a process of identification. We have to know there's a risk out there that we're trying to do something about. Corporately we employ many people to try and understand the risks in the business. We have to measure the risk, what's the dollar amount, if it's a dollar risk, if it's a financial risk. If it's a political risk you might say what's the effect on the health of people, how many lives are put at risk? We have to identify mitigation, how can we change the frequency and severity of the risk? You're familiar with mitigation. This room is probably, the safety procedures in this building, that mitigates frequency, there's almost certainly a sprinkler system up there which will mitigate severity. So we have mitigation techniques. Then tolerance limits, how much can we afford to lose, how much can we put at risk? And finally diversification of the risk, how can we take the risk away from us and share it with a pool of other people so that we lose our risk in a larger group of risks?

The focus of my remarks today is going to be identification and measurement, because I think that's where the business community is today on climate change, knowing it's got a risk and try to work out how big it is is still the question.

But just to give you a little insight as to how we would think about tolerance, for example, setting a limit, just to make sure that I don't go off track here. If you take a company like Swiss Re we would look at risk like, we would publish in our report and accounts to all of our stakeholders the kind of size of risk that we would take on big events. So once in a 200-year earthquake on the West Coast we might take a risk of say two billion dollars, and we would set that risk and if the amount of business offered to us is any larger we either decline it, or we find a way to hedge or diversify.

Let me talk about risk from the perspective of government. Let's suppose that this is a meeting of the G8, and Jeffrey has just inspired them with a talk upon the risks of climate change. How do they address tolerance limits for climate change? And they may conclude, for example, that we could go to two times the pre-industrial levels for carbon, somewhere between 500 and 550 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. But unlike a business which can diversify risk or hedge it, for me, from the point of view of climate change, there is no diversification or hedge for the world with this risk. You just have to stop it at some point in time, you have to stop the carbon going into the atmosphere. So from my perspective there are going to be three certainties in the world, death, taxes and carbon emission restrictions.

Okay, I'll go fairly quickly through my remarks because we have some very interesting panel discussions coming later. I'm going to talk about insurance because I know something about insurance, and I thought it was safe to start with something I'm comfortable with. The insurance industry can cope with events, it's just going to cost more if there's a rise in the frequency and severity of events it's going to be passed onto the pool of policyholders. I'll talk a little about liability exposure, because I think there's an opportunity there for us collectively, instead of fighting battles about the past to focus on something which would be constructive for the future, and I'll air with you a proposal actually for the first time in this room.

I'll also explain that whilst insurance risks look big in the headlines the real key to engaging business with climate change is that they should recognize it as something which drives strategy, which drives the strategic decision making process in the firm. And my fourth point which I'll make repeatedly through the discussion, ultimately government has to make a decision, it has to set a framework for business to operate in, because business alone will reach many disparate decisions and we don't have the luxury of too much delay in this particular area. Finally I'm going to talk about disclosure because what gets measured gets done, and we need standards for reporting emissions which are consistent and realistic.

Swiss Re is not a very well known company, we don't have retail customers. So I thought I would just say a brief word about what we do. We're quite old, 140 years, and we provide risk transfer to large owners of risk, notably insurance companies, and notably the risks that they can not diversify in their own portfolio which is large and catastrophic risk. Okay, we're quite global because wind doesn't recognize political boundaries, and we have about twenty-eight billion dollars in revenues.

In 2003 we introduced sustainability as a core value of Swiss Re, it stands alongside of integrity, excellence and efficiency. And that has resonated well with our employees around the world. By the way, core values are not something that we just put up on our web site. I sent the Chief Compliance Officer around the world to have face-to-face meetings with all of our employees in 2003, and I got an e-mail in 2006 to say he's back. In December he finished, not personally going around to every office, but we had had the opportunity to instruct people in our values and our code of conduct.

We try to reflect our principles in our behavior. You see that building on the left, that's our new office in London. It has windows that open, it's an unusual characteristic, but it lets in air, it reduces the need for air conditioning. We had the pleasure of meeting with governments in Asia, America, and Europe. And we introduced sustainability principles into our ?? management. Now that wasn't a great success the first time we did it, the second half of the ‘90s, the portfolio we established wasn't wonderful, to be honest. We've been reinvested more recently with great success because I think clean energy solutions are now getting a lot of attention from investors, but we'll hear more about that I suspect from later speakers. But also into our product, we think about what are the consequences for climate. You may have seen on television, I understand one or two people have seen a film called “The Great Warming,” that was something which we sponsored. And we've determined to reduce our own environmental footprint to zero over the next ten years. We did publish in our annual report a sustainability report which includes disclosure of our carbon emissions. Sadly they went up in 2005, I have to confess that. We reduced emissions from buildings and from other activities, but we have a strategy to expand our business in Asia and the airline travel pushed the total amount of emissions up. That's a problem we have to solve.

What is insurance? It's a very simple business, it just does three things. People don't want risk so they diversify risk, they pass risk into a pooling mechanism and share it with lots of other people's risk where it gets lost. So they are paying rent, or premiums, for security protection against targeted risks. We provide the pricing so that the risks entering that pool are fair one to another, and we provide capital to act as a shock absorber for volatility, because not every risk exactly fulfills our statistical intentions, so there is some volatility across geographies and over time. And we have to reward the providers of that capital.

There are four principles for insurability, randomness, the insured should be able to effect event, setting fire to buildings in recessions is a popular pastime but it's not entirely what we intended, it must be assessable, there must be some frequency and severity calculations within reasonable confidence limits, there must be mutuality, one risk owner must feel that the situation is fair for the price they're paying relative to other risk owners, and it must be a risk which is affordable within the balance sheets of the insurance industry.

I'm going to talk about this profile in the context of climate change and the big issue is assessability. This is a thirty-five year history of large weather-related events. In the ‘70s the average insured payment was 2.4 billion - these are in 2005 dollars by the way, inflation's taken out of this. And in the first five years of the 21st Century the average insured loss was 28.4, basically twelve times. Now we had a rather extraordinary event in 2005, 78 billion of weather-related losses. I'm kind of hoping that doesn't continue. But that was a truly exceptional event.

Why is it going up? GDP growth? GDP growth from midpoint of the 1970s, '75, to the midpoint of 2005, 2003, is about 2.4 times, so that does not account for the twelve times. Migration of risk or people moving to riskier places, increased exposure, climate variability and climate change are possible reasons.

This is a slide which shows Ocean Drive, Florida in 1926, and Ocean Drive, Florida in the year 2000. Now you want to be careful when you invite reinsurance professionals to dinner, because it become a very depressing occasion. We have a wonderful repertoire of stories about the world's great catastrophes. 1900 was the Galveston flood, 1906 was the San Francisco earthquake, which there will be a centenary this year, 1926 I think was the great canto in Tokyo, but it was also a huge windstorm through this part of Florida, which didn't cost a lot because there's a lot of palm trees there. But if that same windstorm occurred today there would be a huge loss, probably bigger than Katrina. So there's been a change in exposure, which is part of our thinking.

I'll just show you this slide just very quickly. It's of interest. It shows the track of Katrina and Rita, which were two rather big events. And the red color on the Florida coast there, patches also where we are now and other isolated spots, that represents density of insurance exposure. And that represents more than 100 billion dollars per county. Now Florida did not used to be like that. There's been a huge migration of people into that area along that coast, and funnily enough quite a lot of wind goes right through that area. And because I used this slide with some executives from the energy industry, you can see also the oil refineries scattered along there. The other place, by the way, where you get these concentrations of red and high insurance exposure, are right down the San Andreas fault line, so I conclude that people are not too concerned by geophysical risk anymore.

Climate, natural climate change, climate variability doesn't have a one-year cycle. This is a slide which we've compiled using insurance losses, it's a little complicated, but we've taken thirty-year moving averages over the hundred year average, and what you see is some thirty to forty year cycles in the loss pattern. So we need to take that into account when we're saying what is manmade climate change and what is occurring naturally? This is affecting our frequency estimation in assessability.

But then there's this one, and this slide shows weather-related events which made our database, and our database is a little biased because there has to be a financial loss of some significant size, or I think twenty deaths. But you could see over the last thirty years it's increased by a factor of four. And if you read the report that Jeff just referred to that Paul Epstein and his team produced, which was sponsored by the UNDP whom we heard from yesterday, and in fact Swiss Re, there are two other charts referred to which are the exactly stories, the emergency events database from the World Health Organization and a compilation of sources which Paul and his team put together themselves. And you can see the rise in drought and forest fire, in disease, in flood, and there is a significant increase in the frequency of events.

Severity, here's a report that came out in Science, September last year, and the red line, which starts very low thirty years ago is category 4 and 5 hurricanes. And you can see that from being the smallest part of the spectrum of hurricanes it's now on a par with category 1 or the combination of 2 and 3. Severity seems to be increasing, and that's significant. The force of a hurricane, the destructive power of a hurricane, is related to the fourth power of the wind speed, so the category 4 and 5 are roughly 4 or 5 times more destructive than the other categories combined. All of us leads us to believe that something different is happening, which has to be factored into the cost of insurance.

Let me talk about liability for a moment. It's perhaps a US-specific situation, because there seems to be more lawsuits about things in the United States than our other markets. But we're now into double figures on civil lawsuits requesting damages for prior carbon emissions. Okay, it's a way to get money, but it will be a very difficult case to establish, and I suspect rather like asbestos forty or more percent of the money will end up with the legal fraternity, if any money is raised at all.

I would just like to suggest that litigation is not the best way to substitute for policymaking. I would prefer to see some leadership which at a federal level says let's grandfather past emissions, but let's have some actionable targets for future emissions, so that there is a commitment to do good in the future rather than to fight about the past, which will divert energy and will distract from progress on this subject.

So in conclusion on insurance issues, there's going to be more demand for risk transfer solutions because of global warming. I mean things are happening in the world which are creating more risk. Customers of insurance companies do not like risk, so they transfer it, so if you like there's growth in risk for the insurance industry. The chart I showed you earlier about the rising claims has got basically double digit growth in it, and double digit growth in a line of business is nice, as long as you can price it accurately.

We see new opportunities with clean energy solutions growing, and opportunities to act as a business partner for companies which go down that path. We're involved in trying to help the trading of emissions. And we see investment opportunities. A company like Swiss Re has over a hundred billion dollars of assets, and some part of that is allocated to these purposes.

Also weather derivatives, and that's an interesting opportunity because they could be very specific to a location or to a particular business and can help to give people confidence about their business opportunities during a particular year. To give you an example there of something we're trying in India, which is a little more than just a business situation, as a farming community and if you get ten inches plus of rain a year the crops grow, if you get less than ten inches they don't grow, with rather serious consequences. And you can put together a weather-derivative for that situation, I think the premium is paid by intergovernmental agencies rather than farmers, but the farmers can then plan a little better for the future and can get some security.

So for the insurance industry yeah, there's high risk, high volatility of earnings, but a lot of things we can do for our business.

So let me turn away from the insurance industry and move onto the economics of risk generally. There's a lot of risk in the world. Event risk is what I would call insurance risk, and there's credit risk, financial and political risk, which could be inflation, recession, government instability, and then strategic and operational risk which are very much tied to the quality of management in the particular company.

And we've fairly sophisticated in the tools we use to find homes for those risks in corporate balance sheet. So event risk we tend to use insurance. The other risks tend to be covered principally by a combination of equity and fixed income capital. Equity capital is the most expensive. So if you want to cover a low frequency, high severity event like insurance with equity capital, that's usually inefficient. Actually you want to rent capital against the remote contingency that the event happens. That's what insurance is, is contingent capital in the balance sheet. But what's interesting is that the capital surplus in the world's property and casualty insurers is about 800 billion. The equity and fixed income markets are about 40 trillion each. So in terms of the risk exposure about 1% of it is finding its way into the insurance industry. It's a solvable problem for the time being. So if we're going to engage industry in the issue of climate change, we have to engage them in discussion about strategy and how it's going to affect the business outlook of the company.

In ?? to that, two issues, you're forced to do it, corporate governance, and there's a rising tide of interest in governance issues. Boards of directors are responsible for monitoring and reporting material events and uncertainties. What is climate change for that company, how should they regard that, how should they discharge their fiduciary responsibility? Now a group of investors combined under the organization of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in what is called the Carbon Disclosure Project, it started in 2002, with Carbon Disclosure Project 1, CDP1, with thirty-five investors and about three trillion dollars of assets, and they would write to companies saying please tell us what your strategy is, what your attitude is, and what you're doing about it, and can you disclose your carbon emissions? In 2006 CDP4, there will 211 investors representing 31 trillion dollars of assets. That is a chunk of money, that's a serious amount of money. And it gets attention. They're writing to eighteen hundred of the world's largest companies, and not all reply, but an increasing percentage reply and an increasing percentage are doing something about it.

There were over thirty shareholder resolutions last year on carbon disclosure. Thirteen of them were withdrawn because the companies complied with the proposed resolution and introduced disclosure. And we talked about mitigation. So there are corporate governance issues which press on business. But then there is strategy. And strategy is about making decisions today based on your opinion of the future. Those decisions have to satisfy your aspirations for the company. Your aspirations will include growth, will include profitability, margin, return on equity, will include the volatility of earnings, some will include the sustainability of the business model. And the management will look at different markets. I've shown India or China just as examples. They'll look at different product solutions, high cost, low specification, different methods of production to reduce cost, and so on.

The question I think is important today is will climate change be on that list? Because if it isn't it isn't getting into the boardrooms of companies. I think it should be. Actually weather events affect approximately 30%, 25 to 30% of economic activity here in the United States and probably elsewhere in the world. I think obviously industries like transport, leisure, energy, insurance, agriculture. It's a secondary interest for other businesses because they all have a dependency on those businesses. So you can identify a kind of a risk, but the dollar amount is not always particularly large.

?? expected acts of government is important, because if government is going to introduce constraints on future construction practices for your product, then you need to anticipate it, because investment decisions in plant or machinery that are wrong are expensive. And there I think you can not surprise business. Government should be giving clear steers as to how it is going to exercise this responsibility.

Your customers may want to move towards products which are friendly to the environment. You need to anticipate that change. And your investors, as we just discussed, may be concerned about your policy towards the environment, and may inhibit the availability of capital to grow the business.

And I think we can talk about climate change as just a problem. There has to be some proposals for solutions. And Steve Koonin talked about the rise in carbon yesterday. His chart was rather like this. It's been simplified for me because I'm not a scientist. So you see here the rise in emissions per annum heading towards tripling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2055. And the need to stop it. This is a concept which has come up from ?? at Princeton under the sponsorship of BP, and it's called the Stabilization Triangle.

So what do you do, what practical things might happen, and what consequences will they have for business? Well this is the seven things, seven wedges, that were in that report. And you can see wind power, nuclear power, energy efficient buildings, solar, forestry, coal, biomass fuel. So different businesses will view this differently. I'm not going to go through all of them. There may be other wedges. I'm not myself entirely sold on the idea of 700 additional nuclear power stations. I hope we can find another way personally. But some of these are huge requirements. One-sixth of agricultural land would have to be converted to provide enough biomass fuel. But we have to start making steps to do something, and businesses which take the lead should for me be the ones which earn the financial as well as the other success.

Well we had that before. So what does a business do? It can either decide that climate change is an outlaw, that the threat is exaggerated, that it's not relevant to their business decision taking, or it can decide that sustainability will be core to its future business profitability at some time, that it will be a central assumption for whatever reasons. Then it will affect its assumptions about what products to be making, what investments to make today, and exactly what strategy it's going to present to its shareholders and other stakeholders.

If you decide to go down the route of integrating sustainability into your corporate strategy you need to communicate it so it'll be part of the brand, part of the message you give to your customers. It needs to be part of the behavior pattern inside the company. You can't say one thing, do another. As I say, in terms of our own employees, we always found a very positive echo when discussing this subject. And of course you'll have opportunities to find cost efficiencies through environmentally efficient solutions.

Just to close, some personal observations which I wanted to mention. It's not obvious to business, and let's not pretend, it's not obvious to business that climate change needs to be on the agenda for strategy. Most businesses have a planning curve one to three years. Anyway, we can not tell them what is going to happen and where it's going to happen and how it's going to affect their business. And business can live with multiple options, it can live with those companies that believe in climate change, it can live with the companies who do not believe in climate change, and they can compete. So while I would like to think that it's a subject of interest to everybody, and certainly the investment community is trying to influence that, I personally believe that the framework for action can only come from government leadership. A lot of comments were made yesterday about the need for leadership, and I think it should come from government. Because it's not something that we can take or leave, there are many regulations which control business behavior, and adding another one to control climate emissions to me would just only make sense. And then we could all work to the same framework of rules and all be acting in a coordinated fashion.

I said climate change should be a focused issue. I am concerned that once people move from the stage of denial about climate change to saying yes it's happening they will then use it as a pretext for promoting other objectives. The one I think about is trade protectionism. You can easily say we shouldn't trade with other countries because that involves moving goods around, therefore generates carbon, therefore we won't trade with them. Maybe that needs to be debated. I understand the reasons. I would personally be very sad if we had to isolate New Zealand and South Africa and other parts of the world from global trading. I would personally like to envisage a world where we could trade freely as at present, we would travel freely as at present to any countries, and that in that way we enrich our societies, and avoid risks of conflict.

The problem with climate change for business is that the gap between action and reaction is huge, and anyway we can't specifically say what the reaction is. I read an article in February that said the Greenland ice cap will melt in the year 3000, and another one a week ago said it will melt in 2100. We need a little bit more certainty. Things which get measured get done. Let's get a system for measuring carbon usage and get it into the vocabulary of companies.

That you've seen before, so thank you very much for your attention, and for listening to me this morning. Thank you very much.