Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Alex Fox , Author provided Hidden in even the clearest waters of the ocean are clues to what’s happening to the seas and the climate on a global scale. Trace amounts of various chemical elements are found throughout the seas and can reveal what’s going on with the biological reactions and physical processes that take place in them. Researchers have been working for years to understand exactly what these trace elements can tell us about the ocean. This includes how microscopic algae capture carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis in a way that produces food for much marine life, and how this carbon sequestration and biological production are changing in response to climate change. But now scientists have proposed that they may also be able to learn how these systems were affected by climate change long ago by digging deep into the seabed to find the sedimentary record of past trace elements. And understanding the past could be key to worki...

The Cambridge Global Risk Index for 2019 was presented on 4 December 2018 in the imposing building of Willis Towers Watson in London. The launch event aimed to provide an overview of new and rising risk challenges to allow governments and companies to understand the economic implications of various risks. My interest, as a Knowledge Exchange Fellow working with the (re)insurance sector to better capture the uncertainties embedded in its models, was to find out how the index could help insurance companies to better quantify risks. The presentation started with the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies giving an introduction on which major world threats are included in the index, followed by a panel discussion on corporate innovation and ideation. The Cambridge Global Risk Index quantifies the impact future catastrophic events (be they natural or man-made) would have on the world’s economy, by looking at the GDP at risk in the most prominent cities in the world (GDP@Risk). The Index incl...