Much has already been written on the September 11 attacks and their impact on our lives. The perspectives, from the political to the social, from the philosophical to the economic, are as diverse as the backgrounds and the motivations of their authors. The Geneva Association, taking - due to the nature of our research organisation - a strategic macroeconomic view of events, first thought that producing an overview of the impact of September 11 on the national insurance markets would be enough to complement the work that has been going on in other institutions and insurance companies.

This issue of the Risk Management Newsletter looks at paradigm shifts in the early 3rd Millennium and devotes a large part to the emergence of quasi-regulatory risks.

The Geneva Association has produced this primer as an overview of the role of insurance in society with a view to the current state of international discussions on trade growth and development.

The issue of a potential liability of insurers related to climate risk has taken on a dynamic which only few had foreseen. Yet one lesson which risk experts had learnt from 9/11 was that risk management has to focus on "think the unthinkable".

The two following in-depth papers apply this maxim to the topic of climate risk liability. However, this topic is no longer unthinkable, and is not even an emerging risk. It has within a very short time become a "risk iceberg", a real hazar d of which only a minor part is visible, but the shape and size of the iceberg remain unknown.