About Zurich
Zurich's Climate Commitment
— Supporting a 1.5°C future
To deliver upon our 2019 commitment to the UN Global Compact Business Ambition Pledge for 1.5°C — a Paris Agreement for the business sector — we set out a group-wide climate strategy: our 1.5°C Future Plan. The plan focuses on three actions we can take as a business: setting CO2-based reduction targets, innovating for sustainable solutions and developing a deep understanding and integration of climate risk.
Our Goals
Impact — Creating a brighter future
The core of our climate strategy aims to create positive impact far beyond Zurich, into the communities, businesses and people we serve — and the planet that supports us all. We believe a prosperous, vibrant, climate-neutral world is achievable, and have set science-based targets for achieving net zero emissions within our business. We will continue expanding our impact investments and look for ways to demonstrate the positive impact we create. By aligning with a 1.5°C Future and harnessing the capabilities of a global insurer, we believe we can do our part to accelerate the transition to an economy where growth is decoupled from carbon emissions and more than 9 billion people are able to live well on the planet.
Growth — Catalyse customer resilience and transition
As a leading global insurer, our success is dependent on our customers’ success navigating the transition to a net-zero economy while simultaneously building their resilience to the increasing physical impacts posed by climate change. That is why we are investing in innovation capabilities to grow our suite of customer solutions that enable us to tackle this significant challenge as an opportunity both for Zurich and our customers to create a brighter future together. It is our goal to deeply engage our customers, deliver new solutions and enable all our customers with innovative tools, partner networks and services that support a net-zero transition and build climate resilience. In 2020, we launched Zurich’s Climate Change Resilience Services focused on enabling commercial customers to understand, manage and adapt to the current and future physical climate risk exposure of their global operations. Moving forward, we will continue strengthening our customer-centric approach through providing a growing suite of products and services in addition to our traditional solutions that can help support the adoption of transformational technologies like carbon capture and storage, sustainable agriculture, hydrogen as a fuel, sustainable infrastructure, electric vehicles, renewable energy and voluntary carbon offsetting markets.
Quality — Climate-risk optimized portfolios
With the world’s landscape of risk being influenced more and more by a changing climate and a quickly evolving policy response, it has become imperative to deeply understand these risks in order to ensure the allocation of our capital is optimized to keep Zurich and our customers resilient in the face of the challenges ahead. We will continue to invest in data innovation to facilitate our customers to increase their resilience, manage our exposures and continually strengthen our climate risk disclosures for key stakeholders. To do so, we are constantly integrating applied climate science to measure and guide our underwriting of climate risks, responsible investment strategy and overall TCFD1-aligned climate risk management approach – supporting our aim of continually solidifying Zurich’s position and performance as a leading, long-term oriented, global insurer.
Our Actions
Leadership — Setting science-based CO2 reduction targets
By signing the Business Ambition for 1.5°C Pledge, Zurich recognizes the responsibility it has, and acknowledges the role science-based targets play in meeting the Paris Agreement goals. We can use these targets as a basis for solutions for our ourselves and our business customers. We joined the UN-backed Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance as a founding member and consulted with the Science-Based Targets initiative, a collaboration among non-profit sustainability organizations, to formulate a methodology for financial services related to such targets like the interim ones we have set for our investment and operations portfolio in Q1 2021. Currently, science-based targets do not exist for insurance underwriting portfolios. To change that, as a first step we contributed to producing the CRO Forum report on methodology to assess carbon footprints for underwriting portfolios and continue to work within the industry to develop this.
Opportunity — Innovating for sustainable solutions
We work with customers and collaborate with public and private organizations to enhance resilience and advocate for solutions to prevent, or minimize, damage and harm from climate-related perils. We develop insurance and risk management solutions for new technologies, business models and approaches that are needed to achieve a climate-neutral economy. Our industry is transforming from one that is reactively paying compensation toward one providing solutions that actively seek to keep people out of harm’s way. For years, Zurich has been pioneering providing business critical risk transfer solutions as well as protecting retail customers from a range of risks. In addition to the more traditional coverage that supports the foundation of today’s modern economy, we support our customers through sharing risk insights that encourage prevention and build resilience, as well as a growing portfolio of innovative solutions that enhance our customers’ sustainability.
Risk — Assess and integrate climate risks
Zurich’s approach to managing climate risk is embedded within our multi-disciplinary group-wide risk management processes. As such, climate risk is managed in a consistent fashion to other risks to which the group is exposed. We are beginning to integrate assessments of the evolving physical and transition risk landscape into our underwriting and investment strategies, and this work will only accelerate in the coming years as methodologies and new modeling tools are developed. This goes much beyond our disengagement and divestment position from activities predominantly focused on particularly carbon intense fossil fuels.
For further information, see our TCFD disclosure or climate action investment page.
1. Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures
_____________
12 DEALER PRINCIPAL