Since December 2006 four sets of UN Security Council sanctions have been imposed on Iran over its nuclear programme, with Tehran still yet to satisfy the international community that its intentions are solely peaceful. UN sanctions have been augmented by a series of unilateral sanctions regimes notably in the US and the EU. The various regimes target multiple economic sectors. However, while sanctions appear to be widely perceived as constituting a valuable tool for the international community to apply pressure on Iran to negotiate over its nuclear programme, the wide range and scope of the various regimes, and in many cases a lack of detailed guidance on implementation, mean that uncertainty can exist within industry regarding their implementation. Much attention has been focused on the banking sector in recent years as policy-makers have adapted tools initially designed to target the assets and money-laundering capabilities of terrorist organisations to meet the needs of non-proliferation sanctions. This focus on the banking sector has forced banks and financial institutions to enhance greatly their compliance capabilities and procedures. However, other financial service sectors have not been subject to similar attention and, consequently, have not developed similarly sophisticated compliance capabilities. The obligation to comply with sanctions extends to a range of insurance products and activities, especially where these relate to commerce. Implementation can be costly and complex and it can be difficult to determine whether compliance policies and procedures meet the challenges. In terms of reinsurance, for example, ensuring compliance on broad-based, multi-activity coverage has become an important challenge for insurers. The shipping industry has been dramatically affected due to the implications of the sanctions on protection and indemnity insurance coverage. Unusual measures have in some cases been adopted, for example by the government of Japan, which has extended sovereign insurance coverage to Japanese tankers affected by the EU oil embargo on Iran. In this context, the Centre for Science and Security Studies (CSSS) at King's College London proposes to host a two-day themed workshop on Iran sanctions and the insurance industry. This workshop will bring together practitioners from major global insurance and reinsurance providers and brokers (compliance officers, etc), representatives from industries covered by relevant insurance policies (carriers, freight forwarders etc), policy-makers (UK, EU and US) and academia, for a frank discussion under the Chatham House rule. The workshop will have three principal aims: 1. to inform policy-makers on the challenges associated with the implementation of sanctions in the insurance industry; 2. to inform insurance industry participants on how to better implement insurance-related sanctions in practice; and 3. to explore the relationship between the challenges associated with the effective implementation of sanctions in the insurance industry and broader perspectives regarding the effectiveness of sanctions as a viable alternative to military force in addressing Iran's continued failure to comply with UN Security Council demands to suspend sensitive nuclear activities and to fully cooperate with international investigations. The focus on the insurance industry will be of great value in providing participants with an industry-specific, pan-regional perspective on the issues, ideally leading to enhanced understanding by industry of requirements and compliance mechanisms, and by policy makers of the practicalities of implementation. The workshop will also help to inform future policy-making in terms of the challenges and obstacles to the successful implementation of sanctions in the insurance industry.

The world's mountains store and release frozen water when it is most valuable, as summer meltwater in the growing season. This service is an extraordinary generator of wealth and well-being, sustaining a sixth of the global population and a quarter of global GDP, but is highly vulnerable to climate change. Over the next 30 years, the Alps, Western North America, Himalayas and Andes will lose 10-40% of their snow, hundreds of cubic kilometres of summer water supply, and by end of century, mountain glaciers will lose 20-60% of their ice. To map our mountain water resources and predict their future, we must rely on models of snowfall, seasonal snowpacks, glacier gains and losses, and river runoff. The skill of these models is, however, fundamentally limited by the quality and availability of observations needed to test and develop them, and the mountain cryosphere is so large, varied and inhospitable that we lack many of these key observations. In most mountain ranges, snowfall is underestimated by 50-100%, and weather records are too short to have captured a history of their climate extremes. The thickness of only 6 of 41,000 glaciers has been surveyed in the Himalayan headwaters of the Brahmaputra, Indus and Ganges basins, so the lifespan of a water resource used by 800 million people remains unpredictable. This project aims to fill four of the key observation gaps: 1) snowfall, 2) glacier thickness, 3) runoff, and 4) weather extremes, by taking a targeted approach to provide not blanket coverage of the mountain cryosphere but carefully-selected datasets designed to test and improve model skill. Importantly, through the calibration and refinement of relevant model processes at these target sites we can eliminate gross biases and reduce uncertainties in model outputs that can then apply not just locally but across all model scales, in the past, present and future. We will make new snowfall observations with a pioneering method that, for the first time, makes unbiased measurements over areas thousands to billions of times larger than rain gauges, and use these to test and improve snowfall models that are run worldwide. To capture and understand the extremes of mountain precipitation, we will extend the decades-long instrumental record back by centuries to millennia by identifying the signals of wet and dry years preserved in high, undisturbed Himalayan-lake sediments that we will core and analyse at very high resolution. In parallel, we will use a recently acquired and uniquely extensive glacier survey from Nepal to improve glacier-thickness models on the mountain-range scale. We will use our new snowfall maps and projections to drive detailed models of snowpack and glacier evolution over the 21st century for two targeted catchments in the Alps and Himalayas. We will apply our models to our glacier thickness maps to determine how long these glaciers will survive under a changing climate, how much meltwater will flow into their catchments and how this will change. We will test the performance of our models against cutting-edge new flux and hydrochemistry observations of the contribution of different water sources to downstream river flow. Finally, we will determine which climate factors affect the frequency and severity of extreme wet and dry years for the two catchments, and how these events are likely to change through the 21st century. Together, our targeted, data-driven modelling advances will demonstrably improve our ability to quantify how much seasonal snow accumulates in the mountain cryosphere and predict how it will change in the future, what the timescales and potential trajectories for change are for glacier-ice resources, how frequently dry and wet years occur, what climate factors cause this, and how these extremes will change. By making the mountain cryosphere more predictable, we will support societies in managing change in this critical but vulnerable water resource.