The future is uncertain, but decisions have to be made now to mitigate climate change, a cat modelling pioneer told the Bermuda Risk Summit.

In a panel on the evolution of the risk market in Bermuda, she told industry newcomers: “You have to be comfortable with continuing to learn, because things are going to change.”

In her own career, she has experienced a sea of change.

Few people in insurance had ever actually used a computer when she founded Applied Insurance Research, the world’s first computer-generated catastrophe modelling company, in 1987 in Boston.

Her mainframe IBM weighed 600lb and had to be brought in through the window by crane.

“One of my early challenges was just sustaining the company and getting clients,” she said. “Many people did not believe there was any need for catastrophe modelling.”

One of her first assignments was helping Commercial Union Boston figure out if they had too much exposure to coastal hurricanes.

“They used to have a map on the wall and push pins on the properties they dealt with,” she said.

However, with the wave of people moving to Florida in the 1980s, they had run out of pins.

“They stopped tracking the data,” she said.

At the time other “very smart people” in the insurance industry predicted that if a major hurricane hit Miami, Florida, it would create $7 billion in losses. Ms Clark’s model came up with $60 billion. Even she was a little doubtful.

Then Category 5 Hurricane Andrew struck Homestead, Florida, a small town 50 miles south of Miami in August 1992.

The hurricane destroyed 99 per cent of mobile homes in Homestead, and most of the 2,000 buildings on the Homestead Air Force Base. Losses were estimated to be about $13 billion.

“That was a scary figure,” Ms Clark said. “It didn’t take a genius to see that $60 billion, if it hit much bigger Miami, was accurate.”

Hurricane Andrew proved the accuracy of her models.

She sold AIR in 2007, and now runs Karen Clark & Company, providing estimates for losses, numbers of claims, and claim-size distributions in high resolution.

The work now takes a lot less physical hardware.

“Everyone has laptops and computers,” she said. “We also do a lot of cloud-based computing.”

Artificial intelligence is also playing a role.

“We now have access to a lot of high-resolution atmospheric data,” she said. “KCC ingests into our systems every day, over 30 gigabytes of data from satellites, weather models and radar information.”

On a day-to-day level, she is focused on the business development side of her business, but the modelling is still her first love.

She said: “I love just being able to take all of this information from so many different disciplines, be able to put it together into a model that can produce credible and accurate loss estimates. That is pretty cool.”

Today, there are other forms of modelling such as cyber.

“It is a lot more difficult to model man-made disasters,” she said. “Just as soon as you figure it out, humans change what they are doing.”

KCC focuses on climate and weather-related catastrophes.

In 2007, Ms Clark was honoured with an award certificate for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize bestowed on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for her support of the work of the IPCC since its inception.