By Oliver Ralph
Left - Amada Blanc
Aviva chief executive Amanda Blanc (click here) has warned that the insurance industry cannot “speak with forked tongue” on global warming by doing one thing with its investment portfolios and another with the products it sells.
More insurers are promising to focus their often vast investment portfolios on those companies committed to cutting carbon emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement. But in an interview with the Financial Times, Blanc said the industry’s efforts to curb global warming also needed to be reflected in how it sold insurance.
“The underwriting needs to catch up with the investments,” she said. “We need to be having conversations with corporates around our ability to underwrite something which is no longer sustainable.
“We can’t be saying we want to take the premium but we’re not going to invest in these organisations. That would just be incoherent”, said Blanc, who has run Aviva since last July.
The warning came as Aviva pledged not to sell insurance to companies which make more than 5 per cent of their revenue from coal or other heavily-polluting fuels such as oil sands, unless they have signed up to climate targets.
The promise was part of a wider set of climate commitments announced by the UK insurer. Aviva said it would be a net zero carbon emissions company by 2040, a decade earlier than many other financial services companies have promised....
