Raphael Stevens

Bob Jordan is a more than 30-year Southwest Airlines veteran.
Hiring, improving reliability and improving technology for staff and customers are among Jordan’s challenges as CEO.
Outgoing Chief Executive Gary Kelly had a more than 17-year run and will stay on as executive chairman.

Southwest Airlines Executive Vice President Bob Jordan speaks as he is interviewed by CNBC outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., December 9, 2021.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Southwest Airlines’ new CEO, Bob Jordan, has taken on the task of guiding the carrier out of the Covid pandemic after two bruising years.
Jordan, 61, who took the reins Tuesday, has 34 years of experience working at Southwest, overseeing a host of initiatives including Southwest’s network expansion and the airline’s acquisition of AirTran. His career has spanned paper tickets to mobile boarding passes.

He replaces Gary Kelly, becoming the Dallas airline’s sixth CEO in its five-decade history. Kelly, 66, is staying on as executive chairman after more than 17 years as CEO, completing a succession plan unveiled last June.

Costs and labor pressure

Jordan faces a host of challenges: a profit-crimping surge in expenses from fuel to salaries, strained relationships with labor, hiring struggles, the slow return of business travel, and ensuring the airline doesn’t repeat costly operational meltdowns of 2021.
“Just do the basics right,” said Brett Snyder, a former airline manager who runs the Cranky Flier travel service and website. “Run a good operation. For me, that’s all that matters.”
Southwest has already dialed back its growth plans.
“If we need to, and I’m not predicting we will, we’ll continue to moderate our capacity because we are going to have a reliable operation for customers,” Jordan said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.

He estimated that Southwest can’t fly between 35 and 40 of its roughly 730 Boeing 737 planes because it lacks sufficient staffing. The airline is planning to eventually ramp up to a fleet of around 1,000 jets.
Southwest is already trying to address some of its problems, raising minimum wages to $17 from $15 an hour to try to staff up. Jordan has said the airline plans to hire 8,000 people this year, after 5,000 last year, partially the result of losing thousands of workers in the pandemic at the company’s urging, in a bid to cut its labor bill.
Management faces contract talks with unions that represent its pilots and flight attendants. Both groups have complained about fatigue from grueling schedules and being steamrolled by pandemic policy changes.
“I’ve always had a lot of respect for Bob,” said Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, which represents the company’s more than 9,000 aviators. “We are cautiously optimistic that we’ll see a change in the operation.”
Lyn Montgomery, president of TWU Local 556, the flight attendants’ union, described Jordan as “approachable”
“I hope he’s going to be more of a people person than a number cruncher,” she said.
Southwest posted its first profit of the pandemic without government help in the last quarter. It forecast a first-quarter loss as the omicron variant drove down bookings and sidelined crews, but profits for the rest of the year. Its shares are up 0.9% over the last 12 months, less than some of its closest competitors and far shy of the S&P 500’s more than 20% gain.

Better tech

Jordan said the airline would keep key policies like not charging ticket change fees or for checked baggage.
“There are a lot of things that just aren’t going to change,” he said.
But there are some things Jordan does want to improve. He said the airline will be investing in better technology for both customers and employees.
“We’re going to hire thousands of thousands. Their expectation of how they engage is going to change,” he said. “A lot of that is going to come through an app … so we need to work on our employee experience.”
Travelers are also demanding better technology from reliable onboard Wi-Fi to self-service through smartphone apps.
“We’ll be investing in all of that,” he said.

Promoting from within

Typical of the airline industry, Jordan, who has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA from Texas A&M University, was a longtime executive promoted to succeed Kelly from within the airline’s executive ranks, as boards typically value industry and company knowledge.
Just a few miles away from Southwest’s Dallas headquarters, in Fort Worth, Texas, longtime American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, who first took the helm of an airline less than two weeks before 9/11, is stepping down at the end of next month, handing the keys over to Robert Isom, the company’s president.
Last year, Southwest’s outgoing CEO, Gary Kelly, recorded a tribute to his DFW-area rival for his retirement called “Friends in High Places,” a parody of “Friends in Low Places” for a lifetime achievement award an industry group gave Parker.
“Gary is an intense competitor and we’ve battled against each other for decades, but he is also a really good person who is hard not to like,” Parker posted on Instagram on Monday.

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In low-income countries, just 5.5% of people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to Our World in Data. In high-income countries, 72% of the population has been fully vaccinated with at least two doses.
Countries in which civil unrest and conflict are ongoing are also among the world’s least vaccinated, with violent combat making it difficult for vaccines to reach their general populations.

A healthcare worker administers a Covid-19 vaccine to a woman in Johannesburg, South Africa, December 04, 2021.
Sumaya Hisham | Reuters

Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti are the least vaccinated countries in the world against Covid-19, data has shown.
Just 0.05% of Burundi’s population has received at least one Covid vaccination dose, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data.

In DR Congo, 0.4% of people have been given at least one dose, while in Haiti that proportion of the population rises to around 1%.
In low-income countries, just 5.5% of people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to Our World in Data. In high-income countries, 72% of the population has been fully vaccinated with at least two doses.
Countries in which civil unrest and conflict are ongoing are also among the world’s least vaccinated, with violent combat making it difficult for vaccines to reach their general populations.
In Yemen, where civil war has been raging since 2014, less than 2% of the population has been vaccinated against Covid. South Sudan, where disputes over power-sharing are still rife even after its civil war officially ended in 2018, also has a vaccination rate of around 2%.

Many African nations have low vaccination rates, including Chad, Madagascar and Tanzania, whose immunization rates range from 1.5% to 4%.

South Africa, where the highly transmissible omicron strain of the virus was first identified last year, has vaccinated less than one-third of its population.
Meanwhile, fewer than one in three people in Caribbean nations Jamaica, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have been vaccinated against Covid.

In October, the WHO set a target for countries to vaccinate 70% of their populations by mid-2022, but many countries are falling behind. Last week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid could cease to be a global health emergency in 2022 if certain actions — including ensuring equitable access to vaccines — were taken.
Mesfin Teklu Tessema, senior director of health at humanitarian aid organization the International Rescue Committee, told CNBC that vaccine inequity “only perpetuates the pandemic.”
“Every infection increases the risk of severe diseases and hospitalization for the most vulnerable, as well as mutation and thus the likelihood of new variants,” he said via email.
“To save lives and protect overburdened health systems, we need to build a global wall of immunity through vaccination. To do so, we must prioritize access for refugees and others experiencing humanitarian crisis who live beyond the reach of government services.”

CNBC Health & Science

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Grylls recently launched BecomingX Education, the latest initiative from his global learning and development organization, BecomingX, which he co-founded in 2020.
Grylls, speaking ahead of the International Day of Education on Jan. 24, said that he wasn’t a straight-A student during his school life in England.
But what Grylls also remembers was the reaction he received from his father.

Global survival expert and adventurer, Bear Grylls, has told CNBC that role models including his own father taught him that there was more to life than just top grades.
“I feel in many areas, I stand on the shoulders of giants like that in my career and some of the early teachers and later teachers were inspirational for me. I think my late father was a great influence as well,” Grylls said.

Grylls, speaking ahead of the International Day of Education on Jan. 24, said that he wasn’t a straight-A student during his time at school in England, explaining that he didn’t always return home with brilliant school reports.
But what Grylls also remembers was the reaction he received from his father.
“I was never at the top of anything whether its sports or academics, when I came back those things weren’t important to him [my father],” he said.
“I remember he used to go, ‘are you happy, are you loving what you do, have you found something you really love, you know, how are your relationships with those, with your good buddies?’ And those sort of things always mattered more.”

Personal development gap

Grylls recently launched BecomingX Education, the latest initiative from his global learning and development organization, BecomingX, which he co-founded in 2020. It’s a new digital platform for schools to help them teach personal development and life skills.

Speaking more broadly on education today, he said that governments around the world needed to realize there is a gap for personal development at school, adding that “we fail young people” if we only focus on academics and natural talent.
“I think first of all government’s got to realize that there is a gap, you know. That the personal development side of curriculums is critical, its truly critical, and to understand that most of the programs out there, are you know, underserving and they’re essentially quite boring,” he said.

Bear Grylls at The Royal Festival Hall on November 23, 2021 in London, England.
Dave J Hogan | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Grylls said governments must also make time in the school curriculum for such new programs.
“We hear it time and time again from schools, when we trial it there the students love it. The school, the teachers love it, because it’s helping them do their job really well, and 99% of teachers are incredible like that, they want tools to be able to teach and inspire kids well,” he said.
“But if there’s not room in an academic program, there’s not time in the timetables, you know, kids get underserved. So, I think at the government level, its support us, see the power of BecomingX, but also make room for it and make sure that any schools who can’t afford it, can afford it,” he added.

Covid crisis

International businesses who have already funded his initiative for schools include Amazon and Capita.
The organization has also created the BecomingX Foundation to “really empower schools all over the world, even those that can’t afford it to be able to get access to this,” Grylls said. The programs teach a range of skills including leadership, team working, problem solving, communications, resilience and mental health.
The TV star and best-selling author of over 90 books said the launch of this program had come at the right time, in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.
“In a way this pandemic for BecomingX has been incredibly timely. You know, we took three years building this program with all of these inspirational people and to be able to launch BecomingX Education now at this time where young people need these skills, [it] feels really right and it’s been amazing seeing the take up and the positive response from young people,” he said. More

The floods in the central Chinese province of Henan last year, not only exacted a heavy human toll — it was also the costliest in Asia-Pacific in 2021, according to insurer Munich Re Group.
It exposed the enormity of Asia’s lack of insurance protection against climate change related humanitarian disasters, compared to the rest of the world.
The increasing severity of such catastrophes are pressuring insurers and reinsurers to better manage the associated risks, says Kelvin Kwok, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.

Rescuers evacuate stranded people in the waterlogged urban area of Weihui City in Xinxiang, central China’s Henan Province, July 27, 2021.
Li An | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images

The flooding in the central Chinese province of Henan last year not only exacted a heavy human toll, it was also the costliest in Asia-Pacific in 2021, according to one insurer.
The extreme weather event exposed the enormity of Asia’s lack of insurance protection against the rising severity of climate change related disasters, compared to the rest of the world.

“China is a market where the insurance gap is very large or underinsurance is very high,” said Ernst Rauch, chief climate and geo scientist at Munich Re Group. 
“Last year’s costliest natural disaster in Asia was the Henan floods with an overall loss of $16.5 billion, of which only 10% were insured,” he told CNBC in an email.
In early January, the Germany-based insurance giant released a report, which showed “Asia Pacific as a region lags with a large insurance gap of 83% against the global average of 57%.” It estimated that the region saw overall economic losses of $50 billion in 2021, of which only $9 billion were insured.
The insurance gap refers to the difference in protection coverage between economic losses brought about by natural disasters and insured losses.
The second costliest disaster in Asia was the 7.1-magnitude earthquake off the east coast of Japan in February last year, which incurred huge losses of $7.7 billion, according to estimates by Munich Re. The insured loss was just $2.3 billion, creating an insurance gap of 70%, the report said.

Rising risks for insurers

Most of Asia is exposed mainly to typhoons and flooding, said Kelvin Kwok, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.
“The increasing severity of such catastrophes are pressuring insurers and reinsurers to better manage the associated risks,” he said.

China is a market where the insurance gap is very large or underinsurance is very high

Ernst Rauch
Munich Re Group

“This could strain insurers’ profitability and capitalization if they fail to acquire sufficient reinsurance protection or factor in the potential loss deterioration within their product pricing,” he said.
Data from Swiss Re showed that “insured losses from natural disasters rose to around $80 billion in 2020 from around $50 billion in 2019,” Kwok added.  
With natural disasters occurring more frequently in the region, insurers have seen a notable increase in the number and size of claims in relation to changes in climate patterns, according to Siew Wai Wan, senior director of Asia-Pacific Insurance at Fitch Ratings.
“Insurers’ operating stability highly depends on whether they are capable of managing the climate risk in a proper and effective way,” he said.

Factors driving the gap

One of the main reasons behind the problem of underinsuring against natural catastrophes in Asia is a lack of awareness around the value of insurance.
“Communities, financial institutions and governments may not be as familiar with the benefits of insurance,” said Rauch from Munich Re. As a result, they’re unaware insurance can help “stabilize an individual or a country’s development of wealth by smoothing out economic shocks,” he said. 
Low insurance penetration in some developing markets is another factor. That’s mostly constrained by low disposal income levels in those countries.
“For instance, Chinese insurers covered only around 10% of economic losses arising from the Yangtze River flooding in 2020, compared with around 30%-40% for natural disasters in the West,” Moody’s Kwok said.
Alternative sources of capital like insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bonds are also less prevalent in Asia compared to the West.
“This partially restricts the supply of capital to underwrite catastrophe risks in Asia,” he added.

Growth prospects

Given the scale of the problem, insurers play a crucial role in bridging the region’s protection gap, analysts said.
“Many businesses and households could be financially devastated by natural disasters. Insuring against these risks would ensure that when disasters strike, insurance communities could accelerate loss recoveries,” said Fitch’s Wan.
He said the long-term growth prospects of Asia’s insurance markets “remain favorable” given lower insurance penetration rates and “steady economic expansion.”

Strong government support is also critical in driving growth and to deal with the challenge, said Rauch.
Through public-private partnerships, governments can work closely “with insurers to tailor protection schemes… to mobilize disaster relief funds as well as mitigate fiscal volatility resulting from shock events,” he said.

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California water officials warned on Tuesday that the state is set to face another dry year after experiencing a significant lack of snow in January, potentially marking its third consecutive year of dry conditions.
The state’s overall snowpack measures 92% of average for this time of year, an extraordinary drop from the 160% of average that was recorded a month ago, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources.
The department’s warning comes as California grapples with worsening wildfire seasons, water shortages and historic drought conditions fueled by climate change.

In an aerial view, dry cracked earth is visible at Nicasio Reservoir on June 16, 2021 in Nicasio, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

California water officials warned on Tuesday that the state is set to face another dry year after experiencing a significant lack of snow in January, potentially marking its third consecutive year of dry conditions.
The state’s overall snowpack measures 92% of average for this time of year, an extraordinary drop from the 160% of average that was recorded a month ago, according to a release by the California Department of Water Resources. Officials are forecasting that by the end of the month, California’s reservoirs will have 76% of average water storage for this time of year.

The department, which conducted its second snow survey of the season at Phillips Station, located near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, advised residents to focus on water conversation, since most of California’s reservoirs are below-average and groundwater supplies are still recovering.
“We are definitely still in a drought. A completely dry January shows how quickly surpluses can disappear,” DWR’s director Karla Nemeth said in a statement. “The variability of California weather proves that nothing is guaranteed and further emphasizes the need to conserve and continue preparing for a possible third dry year.”
The department’s warning comes as California grapples with historic drought conditions fueled by climate change. It also comes after a year during which California experienced the second-largest wildfire in state history.

More from CNBC Climate:

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom asked residents to curb household water consumption by 15% amid the prolonged drought and record-breaking temperatures.
The state gets most its water during the winter months when storms bring snow to the mountain ranges. Since California saw minimal snowmelt in January, officials said that a return of winter storms in the Sierra Nevada is needed over the next couple months to remain at or above normal levels of snowpack.
“These dry January conditions demonstrate the importance of continuing to improve our forecasting abilities and why these snow surveys are essential,” said Sean de Guzman, manager of DWR’s Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit.

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