Published: 26th June 2026
As an influential and authoritative voice, our Chair, Louise Pryor, continues to speak out on the climate emergency, to raise awareness and aid understanding among the public and her professional networks.
Louise – who joined Ecology’s Board in February 2020 and became Chair in March 2023 – is an actuary and risk specialist with more than 30 years’ experience in actuarial consulting, software development and academia.
She features in a new documentary, a podcast episode and in a list of industry leaders as she demystifies the insurance industry and the role it plays in the future of the planet.
The current heatwave is offering a powerful illustration of the impact of climate change and the threat it poses to human and animal life, modern lifestyles, and governments and economies across the globe.
People in the UK and abroad are struggling to go about their daily lives with a sense of normality. Many will be thinking more about how they and future generations are going to have to change their behaviour and adapt their homes, routines and expectations.
While the insurance industry may not be front of mind as summer temperatures soar, Louise has been active recently to continue to explain the interconnectedness of financial services to record-breaking temperatures and increasingly volatile weather.
Making the connection between finance and flooding
The link between global finance and flooded communities is reinforced in a new documentary, What Comes After The Flood, which includes expert analysis from Louise.
The film, produced by campaign group Mothers Rise Up, tells the story of Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire. Having suffered repeated flooding, the picturesque market town has earned the unwelcome label of the “UK’s first uninhabitable town”, as homes, businesses and even its town hall have become uninsurable.
Louise highlights the vicious circle which ensues as insurers continue to underwrite the industry which extracts fossil fuels. Burning these fossil fuels leads to climate change, causing extremes of weather which devastate homes and businesses. Insurers then refuse to underwrite cover for domestic and commercial properties, preventing householders from getting mortgages and forcing businesses to stop trading.
Commentating and explaining the role of insurers
Louise’s work as a consultant and researcher on climate-related financial risk helps her to maintain a public profile to keep an actuarial perspective in ongoing debates around international corporate ESG and risk reporting.
In an interview for the latest Overshoot podcast, she explains “Why your pension fund is dangerously underprepared for Climate Change”, and the role of actuaries in modelling, understanding and quantifying climate risk and how that affects the lives and futures of all of us.
Thought leadership and agenda setting
Within her professional sector, Louise has been named among the “50 Outstanding Actuarial Thought Leaders Globally” by the Clarity website, listing those “currently shaping actuarial science across insurance, pensions, climate risk, longevity, data science, and the expanding frontier of what the profession does in the world”.
Thought leaders making the list include researchers, practitioners, presidents of global professional bodies, innovators building new insurance models, and industry advocates.
Louise served as President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) from 2021 to 2022, when it was noted that she used her role to ensure climate risk was at the centre of actuarial professional discourse.
She was praised for her “willingness to argue publicly that climate change is an existential risk requiring urgent actuarial attention, not merely a long-term planning assumption to be modelled cautiously” which “has made her a distinctive voice in a profession that has traditionally preferred understatement. The IFoA’s increased engagement with climate research and public policy submissions owes a significant debt to the agenda she established during her presidency.”
