Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues—also known as sustainability issues—pose a shared risk to insurers, communities, businesses, cities, governments and society at large, providing a strong incentive for innovation and collaboration.

Examples of ESG issues include natural disasters, pollution, carbon emissions, degradation of natural resources, illegal fishing and logging, child and forced labour, negative impacts on heritage sites and native populations, poor health and safety, lack of transparency, and corruption.

The four Principles for Sustainable Insurance, including a list of possible actions, provide a common aspiration and global framework for the insurance industry to manage ESG issues, and to strengthen its contribution to building resilient, inclusive and sustainable communities and economies.

Developing global guidance to manage ESG risks in non-life insurance underwriting

A major, multi-year PSI initiative is to develop global guidance to manage ESG risks in insurance underwriting—the core process of evaluating, defining and pricing insurance risks—with an initial focus on non-life business (also known as property & casualty business). Such global guidance currently does not exist.

To learn more, please visit: staging.unepfi.org/psi/underwriting-ESG-risks

First-ever global survey on underwriting ESG risks in non-life insurance business

To develop global ESG guidance for underwriting that’s fit for purpose, the PSI is carrying out a three-step global consultation process to get input from the insurance industry and key stakeholders.

  1. Since last year, we have conducted interviews and engaged with many underwriters across lines of business, brokers, risk engineers, loss adjusters and other insurance practitioners, as well as key stakeholders such as insurance regulators and supervisors, business and industry, civil society organisations, and academia.
  2. We have discussed this initiative at various PSI regional market events last year and this year, spanning Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America.
  3. This global survey is the third and final phase of the global consultation process.

Thereafter, we will start the process of drafting ESG guidance for non-life insurance underwriting, with the aim of launching such guidance in the first quarter of 2019.

Complete the survey

Access the global survey here.

The deadline to complete the survey is 3 August 2018.

The survey should take approximately 15 to 25 minutes to complete.

It is available in 10 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Individual responses will be kept confidential and the results will be presented only in aggregate form.

For any questions, please e-mail the project team at psi-underwriting@unepfi.org.