Thursday, July 27, 2023

Justin Wan receives Arthur Beaumont Distinguished Service Award

This article originally appeared on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

Professor Justin Wan has received the 2023 Arthur Beaumont Distinguished Service Award from CAIMS, the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. Named after its first recipient, the award was established in 1987 to honour Waterloo Applied Mathematics Professor Arthur Beaumont for his many years of service to the society. The prestigious award has been conferred annually since then to recognize a member’s outstanding contributions to the society or to the field of applied mathematics in Canada.

Professor Wan has been an integral member of CAIMS since joining in 2002. He has been a member of the Liaison Committee for Membership since 2007, and has served as a CAIMS representative, keeping colleagues informed about CAIMS activities and encouraging them to join the society. Over the past two decades, he has taken on key administrative roles as well as participated regularly in CAIMS events.

Professor Wan’s major service to CAIMS was as its secretary. He was elected to this important role in 2015 and re-elected in 2017. Over the five years he held the position, Professor Wan organized official meetings, ran annual elections for the CAIMS board, served as editor-in-chief of the annual newsletter, and prepared and archived important society documents. Moreover, since its inception in 2019, he has been an associate editor of Mathematics in Science and Industry, the official journal of CAIMS.

His tenure as secretary was during turbulent times for the society. Much of the workflow followed old practices and used inefficient technology. Professor Wan modernized many of these processes, among them a new online election platform and voting service for members. With these changes, voting rates in subsequent years almost doubled.

From 2017 to 2019, CAIMS faced an extraordinary challenge. The Canadian laws for non-for-profit organizations and related taxation regulations had changed. CAIMS was forced to overhaul its bylaws to comply with new Canadian corporate laws. Professor Wan worked closely with CAIMS treasurer Lucy Campbell preparing new bylaws, spending countless hours drafting legal text and reformulating regulations. Quite simply, without Professor Wan and Lucy Campbell’s efforts, CAIMS would not have survived as an organization.

After his tenure as secretary ended, Professor Wan co-organized with Waterloo Mathematics Professors Brian Ingalls and Anita Layton the 2021 CAIMS Annual Meeting, a successful conference with multiple themes that was well attended by some 200 undergrads, grads, faculty and industry professionals across Canada and internationally, despite the requirement to run all sessions virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Wan and his co-organizers adopted the Sococo online platform, which allowed speakers to give their presentations virtually during group plenaries and in smaller sessions and, equally important, for participants to network and interact with each other as they would at a face-to-face conference. 

“Justin cares deeply about the well-being of CAIMS,” wrote University of Waterloo Professor Yuying Li and University of Alberta Professor Thomas Hillen in their nomination letter. “He has been active in various roles over the past 21 years, and has shown great leadership when faced with changes in corporate law. His contributions to CAIMS over these past two decades are nothing short of outstanding.”

Bringing physical climate risk into institutional investing

Incorporating physical climate risk into portfolio management – think flooding, wildfire or hurricanes that disrupt business operations for weeks at a time – has largely eluded investors despite warnings by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), and more recently, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). A new report by the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation (Intact Centre) at the University of Waterloo will help to fill this void.

Climate Risk Matrices (CRMs) – developed by the Intact Centre – identify the top climate and extreme weather risks that affect a company’s performance, and ultimately share price. The CRMs reflect the collective advice that chief operating officers, working with climate experts, identify as priority climate risks that investors should consider prior to making a buy. 

Climate risk disclosure must be used to help financial markets price risk and opportunity, particularly as extreme weather records are broken with growing frequency. “Fulsome disclosures must not only identify risks, but also identify what measures need to be implemented to reduce those risks, and in so doing allow institutional investors to meet their duty as fiduciaries” said Kathryn Bakos, of the Intact Centre, and co-author of the report. 

The CRMs in the report addressed electricity generation and transmission, commercial real estate, insurance and banking. 

“The financial community should lead the way in developing CRMs, not just for six sectors, but for twenty-six. There is no point in talking about TCFD, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), ESG, or any other combination of letters, if at the end of the day this stuff doesn’t translate into action that lowers the risk profile of the investable universe”, said co- author, Dr. Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre. 

Physical climate risk is impacting companies across all sectors and institutional investors need to factor these growing risks into portfolio management. 

According to Cedric Robert, CEO of Clearsum, “early and proactive investment in adaptation can increase the resiliency of business operations, protect and enhance portfolio values, and create long-term competitive advantages for organizations in a climate-constrained economy - CRMs help to achieve all of these, as our case study in the commercial real estate sector demonstrates”. 

Sonia Baxendale, President and CEO, Global Risk Institute, considers the broad picture of climate change, suggesting that “transition risk related to getting off carbon should go hand-in-hand with assessing how extreme weather might impact the performance of an issuer, and this is where CRMs offer needed guidance”. 

This report should catalyze action – and diminish complacency – by the majority of institutional investors who do not factor physical climate risk into portfolio management. This report offers a practical tool (CRMs) that investors can use to assess the exposure of investee companies to extreme weather and what measures need to be put into place to reduce those risks. 

Visit the Intact Centre website to download the report, “Transitioning from Rhetoric to Action: Integrating Physical Climate Change and Extreme Weather Risk into Institutional Investing”.

Thursday's notes

The participants of the Shad Waterloo high school enrichment program are holding a public open house today to share highlights of their experiences, including creative ideas they have come up with to tackle this year’s design project theme.

The Shad Waterloo 2023 Open Day Exhibits run from 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. in Conrad Grebel University College's Great Hall.

To learn more about the Shad program, please visit the Shad Canada website.

For those of you about to rock your thesis, we salute you. "One day left until Rock Your Thesis Week 3!" says a note from the Writing and Communication Centre (WCC). "This workshop is best suited for Master’s and PhD students who have written at least part of their thesis or dissertation draft. Please bring a laptop, digital copy of your work-in-progress, and a printed copy of at least 10 pages of your thesis or dissertation!"

Today and tomorrow, the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy is hosting a Geothermal Workshop entitled Geothermal Energy in Canada, Development in Remote, Isolated, and Indigenous Communities.

The workshop will explore current activities/developments in all geothermal technologies being used or considered in Canada, focusing mainly on its development and implementation in remote, isolated, and Indigenous communities. 

The event takes place at Federation Hall.