Fossil fuel exclusions are effective but Lloyd’s and Zurich play questionable roles.
Insurance companies which adopted coal restrictions significantly reduced the number of coal mines and the amount of coal which they insured in the United States, thus contributing to the shift away from coal. This is the main finding of a new working paper which three researchers at the University of Zurich published last week (*).
The Insure Our Future campaign has pressured the insurance industry to shift away from coal and other fossil fuels since 2017. We have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that the restrictions which insurers adopted during this period have created bottlenecks for coal companies and made it impossible to build new coal power plants in much of the world. Through freedom of information requests, the Zurich researchers managed to access 9,745 insurance policies across 456 mines during the 2014-2024 period, covering more than three quarters of US coal production. Based on this data, they can for the first time offer hard evidence on the impact of insurers’ coal restrictions.
Compared with other insurance companies, the researchers show, insurers with coal restrictions reduced the number of insured coal mines by 16% and the volume of insured coal by 56%. Mines which relied on cover from insurers with coal restrictions were more likely to be abandoned than other mines. The tighter their restrictions are, the more likely the insurers were to end their coverage for coal mines.
These findings are all the more remarkable since most insurance companies only rule out support for new coal projects, not for the ongoing coal production which the new paper analyzes. By the end of 2019 for example, 13 of the 30 insurers analyzed in the Insure Our Future scorecard had adopted coal restrictions, but only three of them restricted cover for existing coal production in some way.
This suggests that once they adopted coal restrictions, many insurers started withdrawing from the sector beyond the narrow scope of their exclusions. We can assume that the impact of their restrictions on the development of new coal projects, which wasn’t analyzed in the paper (and is mostly happening outside the US), is even more significant.
The new paper identifies two exceptions from the positive overall trend. Lloyd’s, whose restrictions on coal were not mandatory, increased both the coal output and the number of mines it underwrote. And Zurich, which adopted coal exclusions in late 2017, kept the amount of coal it insured stable for five years and increased the number of US coal mines significantly from the end of 2019. It appears that Lloyd’s and Zurich took over mines which Chubb – and for a period, AIG – stopped insuring after they adopted coal restrictions.
Zurich is a leading insurer of workers compensation in the US, which benefits employees and which the Insure Our Future campaign does not oppose. Yet in 2023, Zurich had a market share of 4.8% in US workers compensation but according to the new data, insured 13.8% of the coal mines in the US. And the authors of the new paper found that Zurich took on more than three quarters of the coal mines which AIG dropped in late 2019. It is unlikely that workers compensation accounted for most of this sudden increase.
In June 2019, Zurich pledged to no longer insure companies which “generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining thermal coal, or produce more than 20 million tons of thermal coal per year” after two years of engagement. Since we don’t know which coal companies the insurer took on, we can’t tell whether it violated its own policy. Either way Zurich’s continued or even expanded support for coal is not consistent with its public commitment to the clean energy transition.
Overall however the trend is positive. “[T]he results suggest that reductions in insurance coverage can meaningfully constrain coal mining activity”, the researchers conclude. Insurance companies should use their clout to accelerate not just the shift away from coal, but also from oil and gas.
(*) Carradori, Olimpia, von Meyerinck, Felix and Sautner, Zacharias, Insurers’ Carbon Underwriting Policies (June 25, 2025). European Corporate Governance Institute – Finance Working Paper No. 1071/2025, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper No. 25-58
