The Center for Innovation in Risk, Catastrophes, and Decisions (CIRCAD), a National Science Foundation Industry–University Cooperative Research Center led by Duke University and the University of Georgia, has announced its first round of industry partners and projects.
CIRCAD brings together researchers, insurers, policymakers and community stakeholders to rethink how risk is assessed, mitigated and insured in a changing climate, translating research into real-world financial and policy solutions.
Inaugural partners include American Family Insurance, Aon, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), Liberty Mutual, NASA, USAA and WTW. This deep integration of academic research and industry partnership ensures that CIRCAD projects will be grounded in real-world problems and that research outputs will immediately be useful to practitioners.
CIRCAD’s research, directed by Mark Borsuk at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and Marc Ragin at the UGA Terry College of Business, supports academic leaders from multiple disciplines as they collaborate on multifaceted climate risk and resilience research agendas. UGA’s cross-disciplinary leadership team also includes Matt Bilskie and Todd Bridges from UGA’s College of Engineering and Marshall Shepherd from Atmospheric Science.
These collaborations position CIRCAD to generate actionable insights that support more resilient infrastructure, more effective risk management, and better-informed investment decisions, Ragin said.
“Insurance companies need new ideas and strategies that account for the challenges of climate change, and that can be modeled or tested at some capacity before being implemented at larger scales,” Borsuk added. “CIRCAD allows our member companies to outsource key research questions to an objective third party, to leverage their research budgets by pooling funds with partner companies, and to gain access to the knowledge and resources of our respective universities.”
CIRCAD members came together earlier this spring to decide on the center’s first round of funded research projects.
The projects answer key research questions that impact insurers, consumers, policymakers, and emergency managers, including:
Why are severe storm losses higher than current models predict?
Severe storms that produce hail, wind gusts, and tornadoes can be more costly than anticipated, with over $45 billion annually in actual claims versus $10–20 billion predicted by current models. This gap exists partly because storm forecasts operate at limited resolution and may not fully capture how storm hazards compound or amplify over time.
This project — High-Resolution Weather Risk Assessment for Seasonal to Decadal Planning — addresses these problems by building a comprehensive map of how storm hazards compound across the United States. The team will train AI models to produce storm predictions at a higher spatial resolution. The final deliverables will provide more detailed risk maps and a more robust assessment of compound storm risks.
The team behind this project includes UGA geography and atmospheric science professors, Weiming Hu, Andrew Grundstein, David Fastovich and Marshall Shepherd, Duke professor of ecology, Liyin He and Georgia Tech professor of atmospheric science, Yi Deng.
How do people make decisions about environmental risk?
Environmental risks present challenges for investment, insurance, and resilience decisions, especially when outcomes are low-probability, catastrophic and distant in the future. The complexity of risk assessments can lead consumers to delay choices, under-insure property, or forgo insurance entirely.
This project — Framing Environmental Risk: Modeling the Process of Climate-Contingent Investment — brings decisions about environmental risks into a decision science laboratory so that researchers can identify factors that shape consumer decisions about resilience and insurance. Consumers will evaluate environmental risk information about homes for sale and choose between investments that involve tradeoffs between building resilience or improving luxury, helping to better understand consumers’ assessments of environmental risks.
This project will be led by Scott Huettel, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Duke; Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke and Marcus Cunha, marketing research professor at UGA.
How are people responding to climate risk?
Economic damages from climate disasters depend on both physical hazards and human behavior, including where people live, how they invest in home hardening, and their support for public infrastructure like flood control and wildfire suppression. While scientists understand physical risks well, far less is known about how people respond to them.
This project — Incentive Dynamics in Climate Resilience Systems: Insurance, Public Infrastructure, and Private Adaptation— is being led by Craig Landry, UGA professor of Environmental and Applied Economics; Yichun Fan, Duke University professor of Climate Economics and Environmental Social Systems and Martin Smith, Duke University George M. Woodwell Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics.
The team will use AI to analyze hundreds of millions of building permits, tracking where people build and how they fortify their homes. Research will examine how insurance pricing and public infrastructure affect these decisions to inform more effective climate resilience planning.
How do buildings become more vulnerable to climate risk over time?
This team will develop novel, AI-driven approaches to understand how roofs degrade over time and how that degradation, combined with changing climate conditions, drives damage, costs, and long-term risk.
The project — Climate-Driven Aging, Dynamic Vulnerability, and Economic Network Cost Evaluation — will be led by Beshoy Morkos, UGA professor of mechanical engineering, Duke data analyst Andrew Johnson, and Sara Oliver, director of Duke’s Climate and Sustainability Engineering Master’s Program.
Current models treat buildings as static, assuming a roof will behave the same way today as it will 20 years from now. In this project, researchers will study how materials weaken over time due to heat, sunlight, and moisture. Researchers will use a simulation platform that combines climate projections, material aging, and economic factors to model how homes and communities change over time, helping identify how risk accumulates and when upgrades become cost-effective.
Administrative costs for CIRCAD are funded by a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Research projects are funded by the pooled funds of corporate partners; under this NSF program, 90% of corporate funds go directly to CIRCAD’s research. If your company would be interested in participating in CIRCAD, please contact Marc Ragin (mragin@uga.edu).