Number of supporters for UN sustainable insurance principles doubles since last year

The number of insurance industry participants that have embraced the Principles for Sustainable Insurance developed by a United Nations agency and industry partners has doubled since the framework was launched last year.

The four Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI) act as a guideline for how the insurance industry can operate in a forward-looking and responsible way, in terms of sustainable communities and economies.  

Read the four Principles for Sustainable Insurance 

About 60 insurers, insurance market bodies and international organizations have now embraced the Principles, doubling the number from their launch a year ago, the United Nations Environment Program said Wednesday.

The principles were developed by the UNEP’s Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) through a six-year process. The key issues include climate change and extreme weather events, environmental degradation, insurance access and affordability, ageing populations, good governance and ethical business practices.

“The PSI Initiative has laid out a global roadmap for the insurance industry’s role in sustainable development,” UN under-secretary-general and UNEP executive director, Achim Steiner noted in a statement.

“The insurance industry is yet again at the forefront of creative policies and transformational solutions that can assist in the transition to a green economy,” he said. “I encourage other industries to follow the decisive, inspiring and forward-looking leadership of the insurance industry.”

The Principles are aligned with insurance companies’ core business operations, including company strategy, risk management and underwriting, product and service development, claims management, sales and marketing, and investment management, according to the UNEP.

For accountability and transparency to the public, companies that support the Principles can disclose their implementation progress every year, with information from the founding signatories available on the PSI website.

“The PSI is a long-term initiative,” said Butch Bacani, who leads the daily affairs of the PSI Initiative at UNEP FI. “Year one focused on building the governance framework for the initiative and deepening the roots of global support for the Principles,” he said. “The next phase will focus on turning the Principles into practice-it will be about moving from aspiration to transformation.”

Also Wednesday, Swiss Re released a report on its corporate responsibility practices, measuring against the principles for the first time.

In its 2012 Corporate Responsibility Report, the company says that it screened 170 business transactions based on environmental, social and ethical criteria, and stopped 23 transactions, it reported. In 18 cases, certain conditions had to be met for the transaction to move forward.

Those assessments were part of the application of its “Sustainability Risk Framework,” it noted.  The company said it has also cut CO2 emissions per employee by 55.6% since 2003, according to its report, which also touches on the company’s food security initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa.

“This is the first time we have reported against the Principles for Sustainable Insurance, which we helped develop in cooperation with the UNEP Finance Initiative,” Swiss Re Group CEO Michel Liès noted in a statement.  

“We will also talk more about some of the challenges inherent in implementing sustainability in our business,” he added. “This is because deriving concrete measures from general sustainability principles is not always straightforward.”

The PSI Initiative’s Board will meet at Swiss Re’s global headquarters in Zurich this July and it is now developing a comprehensive global strategy and work program, which will be finalized at the 2nd PSI Annual General Meeting in Beijing in November.