subject: Insurance Companies for Climate Research [print this page] Insurance Companies for Climate Research
"Since when do insurers care about climate research?" you may wonder. If you are wondering as well, you would do best to ask RSA Insurance Group, a global insurer with its headquarters in London, UK. RSA's operations in Canada are more dedicated to marine insurance, but their decision is important even for no medical life insurance.
RSA recently announced a alliance with the World Wildlife Fund. The synergy is a win-win result; it will serve both "the right thing" and also a business goal.
If anyone can realize a climate change in probability figures, it must be risk analysts. Risk analysts (actuaries) cluster in insurance houses. Despite their extensive expertise, the insurers are in some cases unable to foresee what lies ahead accurately enough. After the droughts and floods around the world, plenty of insurance companies bumped into large claims (mostly from their agricultural clients) and thus had to pay significant compensations on insurance products that are subject to changing weather, climate, and temperature. This signalled to them that they were incapable of assessing the riskiness of their products correctly. And risk being the ultimate notion underlying the whole insurance industry, something had to be done about it.
Hence, this experience and the extensive involvement of RSA in marine insurance were the spark that prompted RSA to seek information, opinions and counseling at WWF. Not that insurers were in danger of extinction; they rather are willing to learn about the transformations happening in the environment that WWF watches so intently. WWF directs plentiful analyses to watch over animals whose life depends on the smallest changes in the climate or weather. Through supporting WWF in doing what it is best at, RSA will gain from finer forecasts. This will then permit the insurer (and other insurers) to estimate its risk better, charge for its insurance products more appropriately, and evade excessive outlays.
Given that the new estimates will most probably be publicly available (including to all insurers), the influence on competition between insurers is going to be slight. Most likely, more perfect competition will compress policy prices for insurance clients (as long as the predictions don't prove particularly catastrophic). The bright side of things is that animals in the wilderness will prosper from the RSA - WWF partnership at any rate.
A growing amount of businesses are apprehending that an eco-conscious business model may not only turn out to be much cheaper, but also allure their clients along with the general public. This shift in the corporate mind-set can be perceived in global companies such as Sony, which only uses recycled paper, PricewaterhouseCoopers, also inclining towards a wide-scale change to smaller-footprint offices, and, last but not least, Adobe, who have won awards for energy-efficient buildings using modern technologies many times .
welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net)
