PARIMA Resilience Week: Insurers make sustainability push

Xavier Veyry, CEO APAC & Europe at AXA XL, said the insurer had a “responsibility” in the battle against climate change.

He said climate efforts would only succeed if they were “collective”, with buy-in from the private and public sectors.

Speaking at this year’s PARIMA Conference, the chief executive said climate concerns informed AXA’s investment and underwriting decisions.

The insurer is also educating clients about climate risks, with engineers looking to identify risks and potential consequences.

Veyry described AXA XL’s risk engineering as “a key element of prevention”.

AXA Climate works with organisations to make them more resilient to climate risks. AXA Climate Academy helps companies transition to more sustainable practices.

Veyry said the insurer was keen to “share our experience, in terms of claims management and financial management”.

“We see that there is significant interest from massive organisations to participate to gain a better understanding. So we are deploying it worldwide to give access to data and to our observations, to help as many organisations as possible understand and prevent risk.”

Alison Martin, chief executive EMEA and bank distribution at Zurich, said her firm was also keen to work with clients on climate risks. 

“One of the things we need to support our customers with right now is building resilience to the physical risks. So helping customers to understand how those could manifest for their business or livelihoods… I think that is most critical.”

Martin said Zurich also offered a climate resilience service to clients to help them look towards future risks.

“With the climate resilience service, we add to our existing natural hazard practice the considerations for that longer-term climate view. We use our climate scenario modelling to look at potential futures that may impact on very specific property locations, and also the supply chains that customers have.”