Actuarial considerations around climate-related risks on social security

Climate change is a global issue that poses significant risks worldwide. To mitigate its impact, it is imperative that experts from different fields collaborate and work together. This collaboration is crucial in developing science-based solutions that can help people and organizations cope with its potential consequences. Actuaries are contributing to the understanding and implications of climate-related risks across a wide range of actuarial practice areas and countries. These actuarial contributions can also help inform risk management, policy recommendations and the decision-making of regulators. This paper builds on the International Actuarial Association (IAA) climate risk paper series and is focused on how climate-related risks can impact social security. In particular, it is focused on the way social protection benefits are funded and designed, acknowledging that climate-related risks are likely to impact demographic and socioeconomic assumptions, in addition to assumptions regarding investment returns and financial market stability discussed in earlier papers. Actuaries involved in social security analysis, projections and valuations rely on a range of demographic, socioeconomic and investment-related assumptions that are being impacted by climate-related physical and transition risk. Thus, the consideration of practical scenarios is increasingly important for medium- and long-term projections. There are many uncertainties associated with the assumptions and scenarios discussed in this paper, particularly those associated with the responses of policymakers, financial markets, and the environment to climate risk. While it is challenging to estimate the probabilities of climate scenarios, there is still great value in these scenarios and risks being quantified through projections and valuations to better inform decision-making.