Editor's note: Business Insurance commissioned the following essay by Alexander Moczarski, a brokerage industry leader who recently visited the Catlin Arctic Survey inside the Arctic Circle.

Looking at climate change through the lens of risk management

By Alexander Moczarski

I jumped at the chance to visit the Arctic Circle with the Catlin Arctic Survey when Stephen Catlin presented the opportunity. The lure of seeing and experiencing a remote, storied geography as well as my own personal concerns about our environment weighed equally in fueling my enthusiasm for the expedition.

I am deeply concerned about the potential impact of climate change on the planet and all of its inhabitants, from a professional and personal perspective. The experience of working more than 30 years in the risk business gives a person a certain lens through which to view issues and events—and one who has devoted a career to helping businesses anticipate and manage various types of risk may tend to consider the potential impact of climate change with a different focus than many others.

In the past, I had spent some time in the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia and Atacama Desert in Chile and was looking forward to experiencing wide expanses of snow and ice at sea level as opposed to those on a mountain range.

As we flew into Longyearbyen, one of the northernmost towns on Earth, in Norway's Svalbard region, I was immediately struck by the sheer vastness and raw beauty of the ranges of ice, as well as drawn toward the massive shards of broken ice at the boundary with the ocean's water. The thought that all of this might not exist in decades to come continues to be difficult to assimilate.

The trip had been arranged to impel executives from the insurance industry to act to provide increased profile on the issue of a potentially disappearing ocean of ice and the associated risks. While other survey information has been available from satellites and submarines, the Catlin Arctic Survey was the first that actually involved manually drilling holes in the ice at regular intervals. The results of this research will help enrich our knowledge about what is happening with the perennial ice.

We were informed that even though the area of frozen ocean actually expanded this winter, most, if not all, of the new ice would melt before summer's end.

To say the least, the work of Catlin's team was challenging, difficult and potentially perilous. Manual drilling means toughing out the Arctic conditions while dragging gear across dangerous terrain, putting up and dismantling tents, feeding and hydrating oneself, and maintaining morale.

We were given the opportunity to get a brief snapshot of the types of activities the survey team performed to survive in conditions much more difficult than what we experienced—our terrain was flat and we were blessed with good weather.

Given what we witnessed, the surveyors truly impressed us as heroes. Even with the best gear available, we still could feel to some extent the severe cold of our surroundings. And while Catlin's hospitality made our own situation quite manageable and we suffered no discomfort whatsoever, it was clear that the surveyors' work required incredible determination, commitment and ability to endure extremely harsh conditions.

I left the area with much more than a collection of great photographs and some new friends. I left with the sense that the work is just beginning. The process of ice-melt already may be irreversible. The results of the Catlin Arctic Survey should be definitive one way or the other.

Now that the survey is completed, we need to confirm the direction of events and then mobilize the wide array of skills and resources our industry has to offer to understand and manage the ensuing risks for our clients, colleagues and generations to come.

Alexander Moczarski is president of the International Division of insurance brokerage Marsh Inc., a unit of New York-based Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc.