Time To Move Climate Risk Center-Stage

Insurers are not big polluters in their own right. Nor do they typically have lots of physical assets at risk, except indirectly through investment portfolios either now or in the future when economic transition raises the possibility of stranded assets. Yet the impacts of climate on insurance operations are only too evident.

Losses from more frequent flood events and other climate-related events, such as the wildfires that have ravaged parts of the U.S. and Australia in recent months; changing attitudes toward insuring and investing in high carbon industries; burgeoning regulation and moves toward mandatory climate risk disclosure; and external ESG (environmental, social, governance) ratings that increasingly reflect assessments of climate risk management – are all changing insurers’ risk landscapes.

With the PRA letter to U.K. insurers also setting the expectation that “firms should have fully embedded their approaches to managing climate-related financial risks by the end of 2021,” it’s relatively unsurprising then that climate change has been rising rapidly up the rankings of the perceived most dangerous risks to an insurance enterprise.

In the most recent Willis Towers Watson Dangerous Risks Survey, for example, climate change rose from 53rd position in 2019 to 9th in 2020.