Swenja Surminski

Centre member

Swenja is a Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment|, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), as well as a member of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP).

Background

From April 2007 until September 2010, Swenja worked for the Association of British Insurers (ABI) as Climate Change Adviser. Her key areas of work were climate impacts, mitigation policies, and the role of insurance in the climate change context.

Swenja coordinated the ABI's response to the 2007 summer floods in the UK, led several industry research projects on climate change, and sat on various research steering groups, guiding the knowledge exchange between climate scientists and the insurance industry.

Swenja has been a member of the Management Committee of the industry's ClimateWise initiative, of the European Insurance Industry Climate Change Taskforce (CEA) and of the London Climate Change Partnership Steering Group. She has been advising on climate change risks at UN, EU and UK level and is the author of several papers on these topics.

Prior to taking up her role at the ABI, Swenja was working in the Risk Management division of insurance broker Marsh McLennan and in the Geoscience Team at Munich Re.

Swenja was a Fulbright Scholar in the US, studying Environmental Economics and International Relations at the University of New Hampshire.

Swenja received a PhD in Political Science/Economics from Hamburg University for her work on 'Climate Change and the Insurance Industry' in 2000.

Research interests

• Linking adaptation and disaster risk reduction;
• The role of insurance in climate adaptation and mitigation;
• The economics of natural disasters.  

Policy articles

2011

Ranger, N., Surminski, S., and Silver, N. Open questions about how to address 'loss and damage' from climate change in the most vulnerable countries: a response to the Cancún Adaptation Framework. Policy paper, Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, Leeds and London, UK. Download PDF of paper| (576KB)