Deadline Extended!
Houston Forum on Climate-Linked Economics convenes in January 2026
We want to hear from you! Submit your abstract before Wednesday, August 27th.
In a world increasingly shaped by extreme weather, the economic stakes are growing. Rising insurance premiums, stressed supply chains, regulatory uncertainty, and vulnerable infrastructure all underscore the need for better integration of weather and climate science into economic systems and financial decision-making.
The Houston Forum aims to be a hub for that integration—bridging meteorology, climate science, economics, insurance, finance, and public policy. It’s a space for candid conversations, groundbreaking research, and the cross-sector collaboration necessary to shape a climate-linked economy.
The Forum on Climate Linked Economics is an ongoing joint initiative across the American Meteorological Society (AMS) to create a link between the meteorology/climate communities and the broader community of economists, corporate executives, risk managers, financial planners, insurance professionals, technology leaders, and policymakers. This initiative aims to address economic factors linked to extreme weather and climate, such as rising insurance premiums and disruptions in global supply chains.
Hosted by the American Meteorological Society’s 106th Annual Meeting in Houston, January 25–29, 2026, at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Organized by the Committee on Financial Weather and Climate Risk Management, the Forum convenes experts from science, business, and government to explore economic resilience, risk management, and long-term economic opportunities in a changing climate.
The Forum invites submissions on these topics:
Joint Session - Building for Tomorrow: Climate Mitigation and Adaptation in Real Estate
Joint between the Houston Forum on Climate Linked Economics and the 39th Conference on Climate Variability and Change
The intersection of climate change and real estate presents complex challenges that demand more proactive adaptation and innovative solutions. This session will explore the multifaceted risks and opportunities linked to climate change impacts on real estate, insurance, and economic value, bringing together experts to present actionable strategies that enhance resilience while addressing ongoing gaps.
From Black Box to Building Blocks: Catastrophe Modeling in a Climate-Linked Economy
Catastrophe models form the foundation of how insurers, investors, governments, and communities assess, price, and manage the financial impacts of extreme weather and climate-related disasters. Yet as the global climate system grows more volatile, traditional models—built on historical baselines and limited transparency—are facing critical scrutiny. A 2023 Milliman white paper outlined three urgent shortcomings: a narrow focus on Tier 1 perils (e.g., U.S. hurricanes), poor representation of compound events (e.g., fire-following-flood), and opaque “black box” architectures that limit independent validation. The Geneva Association similarly warned that most models offer “limited decision-useful intelligence” for time horizons beyond five years—an insight underscored by Hurricane Helene in 2024, where inland flooding exceeded model projections by 300%.
These sessions can explore how researchers and model developers are rewriting the future of catastrophe risk analytics by integrating climate-conditioned scenarios, machine learning, and open modeling standards. It can also address how these innovations are being used not only in the insurance sector but also in real estate, infrastructure planning, regulatory compliance, and disaster resilience. Discussions can highlight the convergence of academic insight and operational deployment, including new efforts to create digital twins of coupled human-environment systems.
These sessions will engage participants from across the AMS community and draw in professionals from insurance, asset management, infrastructure, and public policy—each grappling with the rising demand for transparent, climate-aware, and decision-useful catastrophe modeling. It speaks directly to the Forum’s mission of uniting science, economics, and risk in pursuit of climate resilience.
Joint Session - From Crisis to Capacity: Understanding the Insurance Impacts of the 2025 LA Wildfire Event
Joint between the Houston Forum on Climate Linked Economics and the Second Conference on Fire Weather, Technology and Risk (FireWx2)
The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires—including the Palisades and Eaton Fire complexes—marked a critical inflection point for both wildfire modeling and climate-linked insurance systems. With over 17,000 structures destroyed and estimated insured losses ranging from $20 to $45 billion, the fires exposed deep limitations in existing catastrophe models, revealed gaps in reinsurance structures, and tested the capacity of state-backed safety nets such as California’s FAIR Plan. Fueled by extreme drought, record-low vegetation moisture, and powerful Santa Ana winds, the fires defied conventional risk expectations and pushed the boundaries of current modeling capabilities.
These sessions can examine the scientific, regulatory, and financial dimensions of the 2025 wildfires. Key topics can include the underestimation of climate-driven aridity and urban ember dynamics, the role of high-resolution terrain modeling in fire spread, and real-time forecasting innovations such as ECMWF’s Probability of Fire model. Panelists can explore post-event regulatory reforms—including California’s approval of forward-looking wildfire models for rate filings—and the stress placed on reinsurance layers and alternative capital markets. Finally, the session can highlight innovations in probabilistic model validation, machine learning-optimized firebreaks, and equity-centered rebuilding strategies that emerged in the fires’ aftermath.
This session can draw participants across the atmospheric sciences, climate modeling, insurance, engineering, and policy communities—offering a comprehensive and data-rich case study of how climate-linked extreme events are reshaping the tools, policies, and partnerships that underpin resilience. It will align directly with the Forum’s mission by linking climate science to economic and operational decisions in the face of growing wildfire volatility.
Joint Session - Minding the Gap: Sustaining Academic–Private Sector Partnerships and Workforce Pathways in a Changing Funding Landscape
Joint Session between the 14th Symposium on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise and the 35th Conference on Education.
This joint session, co-sponsored by the 14th Symposium on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise Symposium, the 35th Education Conference, and the Houston Forum on Climate Linked Economics, will explore how academic-private sector partnerships are evolving in response to shifting funding landscapes, workforce trends, and enterprise-wide demands for applied research and innovation.
Historically, collaborations between academia and the private sector—such as NSF’s IUCRC programs (e.g., WISER, CIRCS, and WIRC), the AI2ES initiative, and the “Mind the Gap” workshops—have been supported by robust federal funding mechanisms. These initiatives have not only advanced research at the interface of weather, climate, and society, but have also played a critical role in workforce development across student, early-career, and mid-career professionals. However, with significant federal science funding cuts proposed in recent years, the future of such partnerships is increasingly uncertain.
These sessions invite discussion from across the AMS enterprise on how we can sustain and scale collaborative models that support science, innovation, and workforce readiness. Topics will include how academic institutions and private companies are adapting to maintain meaningful engagement, new models for training and mentoring across career stages, and strategies for navigating career transitions from public to private sector roles. We also welcome perspectives on how to embed private sector insights into atmospheric science curricula, and how organizations are fostering inclusive, lifelong learning in an increasingly dynamic job market.
This session is designed to spark dialogue among educators, employers, scientists, and students—and to create space for innovative ideas about how to strengthen the human infrastructure of the weather, water, and climate enterprise in an era of disruption and opportunity.
Joint Session - Storm Signals: Attributing and Managing the Rising Cost of Severe Convective Storms
Joint between the Houston Forum on Climate Linked Economics and the 14th Symposium on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise
This session focuses on the escalating costs of hail, tornadoes, and wind damage. Topics include decomposition attribution techniques, radar-based loss estimation, high-resolution hazard datasets, and how this evolving risk is reshaping underwriting, modeling, and capital planning.
Severe convective storms (SCS), including hail, tornadoes, and straight-line winds, have quietly become one of the most persistent and costly sources of insured losses in the United States. Unlike singular and sporadic catastrophic events, SCS losses accumulate through frequent, spatially dispersed events that disproportionately impact suburban and urban communities in the Midwest, Plains, and Southeast. As climate dynamics, urban sprawl, and inflationary pressures intersect, stakeholders are left with a crucial question: how much of the rising loss signal is driven by changes in the frequency and severity of the underlying physical hazard versus shifting exposure and vulnerability?
This session can explore the next frontier of SCS analytics: integrating high-resolution hazard datasets, insurance loss data, and decomposition attribution methods to understand better and manage this evolving risk. Presentations can include emerging approaches to disentangle hazard trends from exposure and inflation effects; efforts to build open, modeling-ready datasets of insured losses; and innovations in real-time and hindcast loss estimation using radar, satellite, and observational archives.
Invited speakers will include senior researchers in the field of severe convective storms as well as industry executives from catastrophe modeling companies, risk managers, insurers, reinsurers, etc. We could highlight novel research from institutions like the University of North Carolina and Northern Illinois University, including tools such as the Practically Perfect Hindcast framework and radar-based products like the GridRad-Severe composites. Industry leaders will discuss how this new understanding is reshaping underwriting strategies, catastrophe modeling assumptions, and capital management approaches.
By harnessing expertise across meteorology, insurance, and public policy, this session aims to move beyond anecdotal trends and toward a transparent, scientifically grounded framework for managing severe convective risk in a climate-linked economy.
Joint Session - Toward Effective Climate Risk Stress Testing in Banking
Joint between the Houston Forum on Climate Linked Economics and the 39th Conference on Climate Variability and Change
Banks stress test to ensure financial resilience under potential risks. They test resilience following hypothetical financial shocks and systemic risks, addressing regulatory compliance, risk management, and capital planning. While stress testing regulations in some regions or countries are more standardized than others (e.g. in the EU more standardization is applied than in the US), wide variability in stress testing methodologies and expected outcomes exists across regions, countries, and banks. One commonality is that stress testing is usually completed by evaluating the impacts of plausible, yet hypothetical, scenarios on a portfolio.
Climate change introduces new classes of stressors, and climate risk requires new thinking to develop stress tests that have not been historically applied as a matter of practice. The variability in stress testing allowed by regulators, and top-down approaches from regulators to standardize approaches, have both in their own ways created stress testing environments that are arguably useless in the context of real stresses that climate change can put on financial institutions.
Regulators in various financial jurisdictions have begun requiring physical climate risk stress tests to assess their stability in the face of climate-change driven shocks. Test requirements vary widely, but generally fall into two categories. One category is characterized by a small number of individual extreme events, which may be hypothetical or derived from climate projections. The other category is aimed at a more complete assessment of financial tail risks, and is much further reaching in terms of climate stressors. This second category may require methods based on forward-looking climate modeling as opposed to traditional catastrophe modeling.
In this session we draw on public and private sector experts in climate risk and financial tail risk, aiming to expose issues that can lead to more effective stress tests in the banking sector. We explore experiences in meeting stress tests so far, evaluations of pros and cons, and research results that can inform the structure of future stress tests.
Joint Session: Weather, Water, and Climate Applications for Financial Decision-Making
This session explores the intersection of environmental data and economic strategy, with a focus on the growing challenges of water scarcity and the economics of water resource management. As pressure on water systems increases, sectors such as agriculture, energy, logistics, and utilities must rely on timely meteorological and hydrological information to guide critical financial and operational decisions. Presentations will highlight how water availability forecasts, drought risk assessments, and pricing mechanisms influence investment planning, resource allocation, and risk management. Topics may include the financial valuation of water, market-based approaches to scarcity, and decision-support tools for optimizing water use under uncertainty. By showcasing innovative technologies and real-world case studies, this session will demonstrate how integrating hydro-related intelligence into economic planning can enhance resilience, reduce costs, and improve long-term sustainability.
