Tag Archives: environmental risk

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Unprecedented Wildfires Devastate Canada, Leave Eastern U.S. Blanketed in Smoke

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Wildfire season has started two months early in Canada, and the devastating scale of the blazes is already unprecedented. Over 400 fires have caused roughly 10 million acres of burn damage so far, and have blanketed a wide swath of North America in smoke, creating orange skies and toxic levels of air pollution for communities all the way from Canada to the Southeastern United States. During the first week of June, New York had the worst air quality on Earth, and the air quality reached hazardous levels in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. While it has begun to clear in the Northeast, the fires are ongoing and the air quality may continue to change in the days and weeks to come.

Find more answers to common questions about the wildfires below:

Where is all the smoke coming from?

Unfortunately, there is not just one answer for that, as there are multiple regional fires breaking out seemingly all over Canada and even the United States. However, the current air quality issues are coming from out-of-control wildfires in Quebec and Ottawa, Canada. There are also wildfires breaking out in at least six U.S. states, including Missouri, Kansas and New Mexico, but these do not appear to be involved in the air quality crisis.

According to the Associated Press and Canadian officials, the fires in Canada mark the start of what is expected to be Canada’s worst wildfire season ever due to drier ground than usual, which led the fires to accelerate very quickly.

“Right now, with the manpower we have, we can fight about 40 fires at the same time,” said Francois Legault, premier of Quebec, in an interview with Reuters. “But we have 150 fires, so we have to make sure that we focus where the problems are more urgent.”

In total, there are 425 active fires throughout Canada, according to Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, and 232 are considered out of control. About 120,000 Canadians have been displaced from their homes due to emergency evacuations, with the most recent being from remote parts of Northern Quebec, according to Reuters. There are fires in nearly all of Canada’s provinces. The current wildfires in the U.S. have led to no evacuations thus far.

Why is the U.S. experiencing poor air quality?

To put it simply, the Northeastern region of the U.S. and the rest of the Eastern seaboard as far down as South Carolina are stuck in a slow-moving weather pattern that is carrying the smoke and smell from the Canadian fires southward. According to Politico, 13 U.S. states are under air quality alerts, impacting over 55 million people.

The AP noted that smoke from various Canadian fires has actually been showing up in parts of the U.S. since May, but with new fires recently breaking out in Quebec, the air quality has increasingly gotten worse in both Canada and the U.S. The hazy, orange-tinted skies and smoke smell along the eastern U.S. are expected to dissipate soon but may still be present through the weekend.

How do the fires impact businesses?

The fires affect certain industries more than others. Outdoor work like construction, sporting events, primary schools, park services and zoos are continuing to pay close attention to the air quality and have suspended outdoor operations accordingly while air quality is at such dangerous levels. Many professional sporting events have been cancelled. The New York Yankees, Chicago White Sox, Philadelphia Phillies and Detroit Tigers have postponed baseball games throughout the week, with minor league baseball teams, soccer teams and WNBA teams following their lead.

During the course of the week, airports have been taking various precautions, with JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International Airport grounding flights, shutting down inbound flights and changing flight schedules. Similar precautions were taken at Philadelphia International Airport. Because this is an ongoing situation, these measures and flight operations remain in flux.

How do we manage the risk?

In terms of immediate action, experts recommend staying indoors, wearing a mask if going outside and keeping windows and doors closed until the air quality alerts are lifted. By the end of the week, New York City’s air quality is expected to be upgraded from “unhealthy” to “unhealthy for sensitive groups.” To find out about your specific area, visit AirNow.gov.

Looking longer-term, the current fires are a good reminder that natural disasters stretch far beyond hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes, especially as the climate continues to change. A recent study found that increases in burned forest area across the western U.S. and southwestern Canada over the last several decades can be linked to significant human-caused climate change.

For businesses, take this as a reminder to examine how your organization will handle fallout from wildfires, for example, reviewing your property insurance, business interruption coverage, disaster recovery plans or emergency communications procedures. The following resources from Risk Management can help organizations consider the many risks wildfires and other climate change-related extreme weather events pose to businesses and communities, and can help boost disaster preparedness for these devastating events.

More resources:

RIMS TechRisk/RiskTech: Opportunities and Risks of AI

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On the first day of the RIMS virtual event TechRisk/RiskTech, author and UCLA professor Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan gave a keynote titled “The Opportunities and Downside Risks of Using AI,” touching on the key flashpoints of current technological advancement, and what they mean for risk management. He noted that as data storage has become far cheaper, and computation quicker, this has allowed risk assessment technology to improve. But with these improvements come serious risks.

Srinivasan provided an overview of where artificial intelligence and machine learning stand, and how companies use these technologies. AI is “already here,” he said, and numerous companies are using the technology, including corporate giants Uber and Airbnb, whose business models depend on AI. He also stressed that AI is not the threat portrayed in movies, and that these portrayals have led to a kind of “generalized AI anxiety,” a fear of robotic takeover or the end of humanity—not a realistic scenario.

However, the algorithms that support them and govern many users’ online activities could end up being something akin to the “pre-cogs” from Minority Report that predict future crimes because the algorithms are collecting so much personal information. Companies are using these algorithms to make decisions about users, sometimes based on data sets that are skewed to reflect the biases of the people who collected that data in the first place.

Often, technology companies will sell products with little transparency into the algorithms and data sets that the product is built around. In terms of avoiding products that use AI and machine learning that are built with implicit bias guiding those technologies, Srinivasan suggested A/B testing new products, using them on a trial or short-term basis, and using them on a small subset of users or data to see what effect they have.

When deciding which AI/machine learning technology their companies should use, Srinivasan recommended that risk professionals should specifically consider mapping out what technology their company is using and weigh the benefits against the potential risks, and also examining those risks thoroughly and what short- and long-term threats they pose to the organization.

Specific risks of AI (as companies currently use it) that risk professionals should consider include:

  • Economic risk in the form of the gig economy, which, while making business more efficient, also leaves workers with unsustainable income
  • Increased automation in the form of the internet of things, driverless vehicles, wearable tech, and other ways of replacing workers with machines, risk making labor obsolete.
  • Users do not get benefits from people and companies using and profiting off of their data.
  • New technologies also have immense environmental impact, including the amount of power that cryptocurrencies require and the health risks of electronic waste.
  • Issues like cyberwarfare, intellectual property theft and disinformation are all exacerbated as these technologies advance.
  • The bias inherent in AI/machine learning have real world impacts. For example, court sentencing often relies on biased predictive algorithms, as do policing, health care facilities (AI giving cancer treatment recommendations, for example) and business functions like hiring.

Despite these potential pitfalls, Srinivasan was optimistic, noting that risk professionals “can guide this digital world as much as it guides you,” and that “AI can serve us all.”

RIMS TechRisk/RiskTech continues today, with sessions including:

  • Emerging Risk: AI Bias
  • Connected & Protected
  • Tips for Navigating the Cyber Market
  • Taking on Rising Temps: Tools and Techniques to Manage Extreme Weather Risks for Workers
  • Using Telematics to Give a Total Risk Picture

You can register and access the virtual event here, and sessions will be available on-demand for the next 60 days.

RIMS ERM Conference 2021: Lloyd’s Chairman on the Vital Role of Risk Management in Fighting Climate Change

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With climate change quickly becoming one of the most important issues facing the world, Lloyd’s Chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown stressed the importance of ESG initiatives to address the threat, as well as the vital role of risk managers, in today’s keynote address at the RIMS ERM Conference 2021 in New York City.

As evidenced by the increasing number of weather and climate-related natural disasters in recent years, the stakes couldn’t be higher for organizations and communities around the world, according to Carnegie-Brown. “Disruption, poorly managed, could destabilize our economy,” he said.

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“Delay could destroy our ecosystem.”

Failing to take action on the climate change threat is not a sustainable strategy and will only exacerbate the damage in the future, Carnegie-Brown warned. In the face of these threats, risk managers have an important role to play in helping their organizations embrace ESG and become more resilient. “A business’s risk operations are an essential component of building ESG into the organization—often they are the driving force.

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” he said. “Executives rely on their insight to power their decisions and navigate the pitfalls of new challenges. Like insurance, it enables braver decisions and more courageous action. Communicated effectively, that insight can establish a permanent place at the table for risk management.”

To be most effective, Carnegie-Brown suggested that risk managers play close attention to how they are perceived and how they interact with the rest of the organization. “If risk managers are perceived as being reactive, we need to make sure we are on the front-foot in understanding and assessing these emerging issues,” he said. “If we’re perceived as operating in the shadows, we need to be transparent in our methodology and in our motives. And if we’re perceived as obstructive, we should consider a flexible approach that allows our organizations to act innovatively and with an awareness of the potential risk.”

While it represents a daunting challenge, Carnegie-Brown saw an opportunity for risk managers to demonstrate their value by taking on the difficult task of developing organization-wide plans to address climate change. “Those plans must account for the multifaceted nature of environmental risk, they must employ the best of our skills and technologies to communicate the risk to our stakeholders, and they must be built to facilitate and orderly and urgent transition,” he said.

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“Achieving this will allow us to carve out a pioneering role for risk management in the fight against climate change, while helping our organizations to become more inviting to investors, more attractive to prospective employees, and more likely to last sustainably in the decades to come.”

The Planet’s Plastic Garbage Problem

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A giant island composed of plastic waste thrice the size of France is floating in the Pacific Ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) contains 1.

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8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 metric tons. It is located between Hawaii and California, which has the distinction of being the world’s largest accumulation zone for ocean plastics because it just happens to be where multiple sea currents meet and where the (mostly) plastic mass churns.

The GPGP was on Risk Management Monitor’s radar back in 2014 (and prior to that, as well) and even then, it was already considered one of the costliest man-made disasters in history. But new developments from the Ocean Cleanup Foundation (OCF) confirmed that the buoyant junk heap exceeds earlier projections of its size and scope. According to the OCF, the newly released estimates are four to 16 times higher than previously expected for the GPGP’s overall size. 92% of the mass is represented by larger objects; while only 8% of the mass is contained in microplastics, defined as pieces smaller than a quarter-inch in size.

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“We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered,” said Dr. Julia Reisser, chief scientist of the expeditions. “We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments, but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris.”

The OCF has removal plans in motion and scientists said this situation also highlights the need for stronger recycling efforts.

Boyan Slat, founder of the OCF and co-author of the study, elaborated on the relevance of the findings for his organization’s cleanup plans: “To be able to solve a problem, we believe it is essential to first understand it. These results provide us with key data to develop and test our cleanup technology, but it also underlines the urgency of dealing with the plastic pollution problem. Since the results indicate that the amount of hazardous microplastics is set to increase more than tenfold if left to fragment, the time to start is now.”

OCF, which is privately funded, plans to remove the plastic heap using an autonomous floating system (composed of high-density polyethylene, a durable and recyclable material) designed to capture small plastic particles less than a half-inch and as large as tens of yards wide. Cleanup is expected to begin in the next six months and OCF models indicate that half of the GPGP can be removed by 2023. According to its website:

By removing the plastic while most of it is still large, we prevent it from breaking down into dangerous microplastics. Combining the cleanup with source reduction on land paves the road towards a plastic-free ocean in 2050.

Unfortunately, such a huge environmental risk is not limited to the Pacific.

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Last month, a study released in Frontiers in Marine Science found lots of microplastics in the fish and marine life of the North Atlantic Ocean:

Using forensic methods, this study assessed microplastic frequency of occurrence in mesopelagic fish gut contents from a warm-core eddy in the Northwest Atlantic. We detected a significantly higher occurrence rate of 73% in contrast to previous studies reporting occurrence rates of 11% in the North Atlantic and 9% and 35% in the North Pacific Gyre regions.

In a recent USA Today article, one Frontiers study author reminded that just because these fish may be out of our physical reach, our waste knows no bounds.

“These seemingly remote fishes located thousands of kilometers (miles) from land and 600 meters (2,000 feet) down in our ocean are not isolated from our pollution,” said study co-author Tom Doyle, a marine biologist at the National University of Ireland in Galway.