Request for Proposals: Developing Actuarial Frameworks to Quantify and Manage Climate Risk

The Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), through its Climate and Sustainability Working Group, is soliciting research proposals and awarding up to two projects that support the development of innovative actuarial approaches to understanding, quantifying, and managing the climate risks facing insurers. While awards in the $40,000-$50,000 range are typical, proposals may request up to $75,000 with clear justification (e.g., data acquisition, model licensing, and/or multi-peril or multi-geography scope).

Proposals should be submitted by May 22, 2026.

Research Problem Description

Earth’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate in the last several millennia. Long-term changes in climate conditions are already producing significant economic and societal impacts that are expected to accelerate in the future. Everyone, from corporations to investors, insurers to policyholders, and governments to the public, will be affected by these changes in interconnected and complex ways. 

Members of the Casualty Actuarial Society play a critical role in helping insurers, governments, and the public understand, mitigate, and respond to this evolving risk landscape. Climate risk challenges many of the traditional assumptions, data sources, and methodologies used by actuaries to assess environmental, societal, and economic risk. Actuaries will need to develop new strategies, analytic approaches, and insurance solutions across the short-, medium-, and long-term horizons. 

This RFP seeks research that advances the actuarial profession’s ability to define, measure, and manage climate-related risks. The CAS is particularly interested in research that develops practical tools, builds thought leadership and provides case studies that broaden our capacity to achieve a sustainable future under a changing global climate.

The resulting research should equip actuaries with actionable insights and methodologies to better assess, communicate, and mitigate climate-related risks.

Proposal winners will also be granted access to the CAS’s subscription to Regrid, a comprehensive dataset on U.S. residential properties that is sourced from tax assessor data and includes parcel boundaries and other spatial details.

Projects may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

1. Perils, Hazards, and Climate-Related Change
   
   Research on how changing climate conditions may affect insured perils and hazard characteristics, and how actuaries should interpret and model these changes.

   Topics may include:

   • Impacts of changing climate conditions on frequency, severity, tail risk, and correlation of insured perils, including but not limited to:
     • Tropical cyclones
     • Severe convective storms
     • Rainfall-driven and coastal flooding
     • Wildfire
     • Drought
     • Winter storms
   • Distinguishing climate-related signal versus natural variability, including climate attribution science
   • Translation of relevant climate science concepts into meaningful frameworks for actuaries
   • Primary research on how weather patterns (e.g., frequency, intensity, duration, or geographic distribution) will change under different future scenarios.
     
      
2. Actuarial Practice, Risk Management, and Decision-Making
   
   Research on incorporating climate-related risk into core actuarial and risk management functions.

   Topics may include:

   • Practical approaches to incorporating climate considerations into:
     • Pricing and rating
     • Underwriting guidelines
     • Reinsurance purchase and program design
     • Capital allocation and solvency assessment
     • Enterprise risk management
   • Methods for separating signal from noise under uncertainty
   • Implications of geographic concentration, diversification, and correlation
   • Consideration of secondary impacts, such as claims inflation, demand surge, infrastructure degradation, or litigation risk
     
      
3. Mitigation, Adaptation, and Resilience Investment
   
   Research evaluating mitigation and adaptation strategies from an actuarial perspective, with emphasis on long-term cost, benefit, and risk reduction.

   Topics may include:

   • Impacts of building codes, land-use policies, mitigation measures, and resilience investments on reducing insured and economic losses
   • Actuarial methods for assessing cost-effectiveness, uncertainty, and timing of adaptation investments
   • Evaluation of nature-based solutions as complements to engineered defenses
   • Design of incentives for policyholders, insurers, and governments to promote loss prevention
     
      
4. Insurability and Market Structure

   Research on how climate risk affects insurance market dynamics and access to coverage.

   Topics may include:

   • Market responses to increasing climate risk, including market retreat from high-risk areas
   • Implications for availability, affordability, and adverse selection
   • Design and funding of residual and public insurance markets
   • Actuarial analysis of distributional impacts across policyholders/communities, insurers/reinsurers, and public-sector stakeholders
   • Tradeoffs between risk-based pricing, affordability objectives, and long-term market sustainability
     
      
5. Risk Transfer, Financing, and Climate-Related Capital
   
   Research evaluating mechanisms for transferring and financing climate-related risk and supporting resilience.

   Topics may include:

   • Performance of traditional reinsurance structures under increasing climate volatility
   • Appropriate use cases and limitations of parametric or index-based insurance in solving climate-related risk challenges
   • Role of capital markets, private-public partnerships, and climate risk finance in supplementing insurance capacity
   • Alignment of risk transfer structures with long-term adaptation and resilience objectives
      

Proposal Requirements

Interested researchers should submit proposals that include the following components:

• Research Plan: A detailed description of the proposed research objectives, scope, methodology, data sources, and anticipated deliverables.

• Budget: A proposed budget outlining labor costs commensurate with the time required, along with any other anticipated out-of-pocket expenses including but not limited to data, compute and storage costs, and coding agent licenses. Total requested funding should not exceed $75,000 (USD). (Note: A portion of the funding should be used to cover reasonable and customary travel expenses to present the research at a CAS-sponsored seminar or meeting.)

• Researcher Qualifications: Curricula vitae or resumes of all proposed researchers, demonstrating relevant education, professional experience, and subject-matter expertise necessary to successfully complete the research.

Interested parties are welcome to submit questions about the RFP until May 19, three days before the proposal due date. All questions and responses will be circulated to those respondents who have submitted questions or who have expressed their intent to submit proposals by May 22, 2026. Submit questions and proposals to Olivia Curtis (ocurtis@casact.org), Program Coordinator, and copy to Carrie Cross (ccross@casact.org), Strategy and Learning Partner. “Developing Actuarial Frameworks to Quantify and Manage Climate Risk” must be in the subject line.

A CAS contract will be awarded to the researchers who, in the judgment of the Climate and Sustainability Working Group, best demonstrate the ability to successfully perform the scope of work outlined in the RFP. The Climate and Sustainability Working Group reserves the right to decline all proposals if none are determined to meet the requirements of the RFP. Researchers may also be granted access to the CAS’s Regrid dataset subscription.

Report Ownership, Publication Requirements, and Presentation

As a condition of selection, the CAS requires that all rights, title, and interests, including copyright and patent rights, be owned by the CAS. The selected researcher/research team must sign a formal research agreement that assigns all such rights to the CAS. In any publication of the report, the researcher(s) will receive appropriate authorship credit.

In addition to producing a research paper for CAS publication, the selected researchers must also deliver an executive summary of the paper (two to three pages) suitable as a blog post or magazine article. This summary should highlight the key takeaways from the paper and be understandable by a non-technical audience.

Authors will be required to upload their final paper electronically to the CAS’s Scholar One system. The final paper submissions should include an electronic file of the paper in Microsoft Word or LaTeX, an accompanying pdf, separate files for figures in JPEG or PNG format in at least 300 dpi, and supplementary attachments/datasets (R files, .xls, etc.).

Authors must acknowledge the use of artificial intelligence, if any, while producing research.

To aid research adoption, the final work product’s code and data will also be placed in the CAS’s GitHub repository, https://github.com/casact, under the MPL2.0 license. Researcher(s) should make every effort to be available to present the report at a CAS meeting or seminar.

Timeline

• May 22, 2026 Proposals Due
• July/August 2026 Selection
• TBD Initial Meeting with Project Oversight Group (POG)
• TBD Follow up Meetings with POG
• February 1, 2027 Completed Project Deadline

About the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS)

The CAS was organized in 1914 as a professional society for the promotion of actuarial and statistical science as applied to insurance other than life insurance, such as automobile, liability other than automobile, workers compensation, fire, homeowners, commercial multiple peril, and others. Such promotion is accomplished by communication with those affected by insurance, presentation and discussion of papers, attendance at seminars and workshops, collection of a library, research, and other means. The membership of the CAS includes over 11,000 actuaries worldwide, employed by insurance companies, industry advisory organizations, national brokers, accounting firms, educational institutions, state insurance departments, the federal government and independent consultants.

About the CAS Climate and Sustainability Working Group

The CAS Climate and Sustainability Working Group addresses actuarial issues related to climate risk and sustainability within the Property-Casualty sector. It is a cross-functional body, providing guidance on climate and sustainability-related research, professional education, and outreach.