Climate change is having a profound impact on the insurance industry. With rising global average temperatures and associated extreme weather events such as severe storms, floods, droughts and wildfires, insurance companies are facing an increase in the number and severity of claims.

The Summer School for Actuaries 2025 focuses on providing in-depth theoretical and practical insights into climate risk modelling. Mathematical and statistical models will be used to simulate the potential effects of climate change and discuss the implications for insurers. Delve into the importance of natural hazards, learn about the latest developments and methodologies in climate risk modelling, and get an introduction to the Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) distribution, including Gumbel, Fréchet and Weibull distribution functions.

From theoretical foundations to practical applications, you will learn how to model extreme events such as heavy rainfall, windstorms, and hail.

Speaker

Erwan Koch

has been scientific and executive director of the Expertise Center for Climate Extremes (ECCE) at the University of Lausanne since June 2023. Previously, he was a Bernoulli lecturer and researcher in statistics at EPFL. Erwan’s research to date has focused primarily on spatial extreme value statistics, theory of spatial risk measures and their applications to extreme weather risks. He has a great passion for weather and climate and uses his interdisciplinary expertise to combine physics, statistics, machine learning and actuarial science. In doing so, it contributes to improving the forecast and projection of severe weather events and their impacts.

Ryan Cotsakis

has a PhD in mathematics and has contributed to projects aimed at understanding and predicting extreme environmental phenomena. He is currently moving to a postdoctoral position at the Expertise Center for Climate Extremes (ECCE) at the University of Lausanne, where he will focus on modeling the occurrence of extreme hailstorms and their impact on infrastructure.

Carina Götzen

works as a senior consultant at Meyerthole Siems Kohlruss Gesellschaft für actuarielleberatung mbH. The actuary (DAV/AVÖ) studied business mathematics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her focus is on data pools, tariffing and natural disaster modeling

Organizing Commitee

Univ.-Prof.in Dr.in Michaela Szölgyenyi

is Professor of Stochastic Processes at the University of Klagenfurt (AAU).

Her research interests focus on numerical methods and the analysis of stochastic differential equations and their applications in machine learning, energy markets, and financial and actuarial mathematics.

After completing her doctorate at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, she worked as a postdoc at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Afterwards, financed by a scholarship from the AXA Research Fund, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Seminar for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zurich and an associated employee at RiskLab Switzerland.

She is currently the coordinator of the FWF doc.funds doctoral school for modeling – analysis – optimization of discrete, continuous and stochastic systems. Univ.-Prof. DIin Dr. Michaela Szölgyenyi is a member of the advisory board of the Austrian Actuarial Association (AVÖ).

DI Dr. Jürgen Hartinger

Jürgen Hartinger has been a member of the board at Kärntner Landesversicherung (KLV) since 2014.
After completing his doctorate at TU Graz with the focus on actuarial and financial mathematics, he served as a research scientist at RICAM (ÖAW).
When joining the KLV in 2006, he headed the actuarial office. His duties included the implementation of quantitative methods in enterprise risk management and Solvency II.