Created: Sep 29, 2022 07:59 AM
Lisa Rose, a Bermudian, is a climate campaigner with 350.org and co-founding father of Bermuda Environmental Sustainability Taskforce
Bermuda has dodged a bullet and averted the worst impacts of Hurricane Fiona. But Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic weren’t so lucky. The hurricane dropped up to 30 inches of rain on these islands, killed at the least eight individuals, knocked out energy for greater than three million and triggered at the least $4 billion in damages.
As the oceans are warming, we all know that climate change will solely make hurricanes extra devastating within the years and a long time to come. The essential driver of this course of is the burning of coal, oil and gasoline in what United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has referred to as a “broken energy system” and “collective suicide”.
Fossil gasoline tasks couldn’t be financed, constructed and operated if insurance corporations didn’t underwrite their dangers. As it occurs, Bermuda’s specialty insurers have a powerful presence within the power market and are among the many most lively underwriters of coal, oil and gasoline corporations and their tasks.
Insurance corporations have warned about escalating climate dangers for a number of a long time. In current years, a lot of them have began to put their cash the place their mouth is and have restricted their help for the fossil gasoline trade. By now 41 main insurers have adopted coal exit insurance policies and 12 have restricted their providers for oil and gasoline.
Among Bermuda’s specialty insurers, Axis Capital and Fidelis have adopted restrictions on their providers to the coal and tar sands trade, and Fidelis will limit its cowl for standard oil and gasoline corporations from 2024. Convex has stopped insuring new thermal coalmines however continues to help coal energy crops, and oil and gasoline tasks.
“The insurance industry has a hugely important role to play in holding companies to account and making change happen,” Richard Brindle, the Fidelis chief government, mentioned solely final week. “But nothing changes unless we are prepared to walk away from activities that are harmful to the environment, people, society and animals.”
In distinction to Axis Capital and Fidelis, Bermudian insurers Allied World, Everest Re, Argo Group, Hamilton, Lancashire and Ark haven’t adopted any restrictions on their providers to the coal, oil and gasoline trade. They proceed to underwrite the enlargement of fossil gasoline tasks because the climate disaster creates ever extra extreme hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and droughts, and wreaks havoc on the nations least liable for it.
Bermuda can be attempting to place itself as the worldwide centre for the quickly rising marketplace for climate threat finance. “We have the credibility to reach out to investors and entrepreneurs in this space,” argues Stephen Weinstein, the chairman of the Bermuda Business Development Agency, “in part because of our background in climate leadership in re/insurance.”
We applaud Bermuda’s curiosity in strengthening the worldwide system of climate threat finance. But the specialty insurers in Hamilton can’t have it each methods: arsonists can’t be firefighters and insurance corporations can’t proceed to gasoline climate breakdown and play a reputable position in managing climate dangers on the identical time.
As Bermudians restore the damages and depend their blessings after Fiona’s close to-miss, the insurers in Hamilton ought to rethink their position. They ought to now not act as fossil gasoline insurers of final resort whereas we will nonetheless avert essentially the most critical impacts of climate change and may place themselves as main underwriters of the clear power transition as an alternative.
• Lisa Rose, a Bermudian, is a climate campaigner with 350.org and co-founding father of Bermuda Environmental Sustainability Taskforce
Peter Bosshard, a citizen of Switzerland, co-ordinates the worldwide Insure Our Future marketing campaign (Photograph by Christine Bärlocher)
• Peter Bosshard, a citizen of Switzerland, co-ordinates the worldwide Insure Our Future marketing campaign
