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Knowledgeable on both the physical impacts and the net-zero transition agenda, Swenja Surminski is a leading international expert on climate change, resilience and disaster risk management with a special focus on risk financing, insurance and risk governance in a broader sustainability context.  

She joins Marsh McLennan from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, where she was Deputy Director and the Head of Climate Adaptation Research, and where she continues to hold a role as Professor in Practice focusing on Sustainable Finance, Climate Resilience and Natural Capital. 

She has held several advisory roles with corporates, regulatory authorities and governments, including as Visiting Academic at the Bank of England, and with insurers working on climate stress testing and scenario analysis. With the World Bank she developed the Triple Resilience Dividend, a tool now widely used to assess the co-benefits of resilience. Prior to her academic career Swenja worked at Marsh UK.

Swenja currently chairs the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative and is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.  She was a founding member of the ClimateWise Management Committee. 

She was also a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and has led the work on business and industry for the UK's Climate Change Risk Assessment. The UK Government recently appointed her to the UK Climate Change Committee, an independent statutory body that advises the UK government on emissions targets and reports to Parliament on progress made in reducing emissions and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

She was a Fulbright scholar and earned degrees in political science and ecological economics.  She is the author of several books and many reports and journal articles on climate and sustainability.

Marsh McLennan offers a wide breadth of climate and sustainability capabilities.  It works with clients to understand and quantify climate risks, helps businesses and financial institutions set and execute low-carbon transition strategies that collectively chart a path to net-zero, and advises clients on how to prepare, engage and empower their workforces to execute these transformations.