Many insurance companies across Europe and North America just wrapped up their annual shareholder meetings. Insure Our Future network organisations recently attended to assess how insurers are approaching climate risk and fossil fuels, as the climate crisis intensifies and threatens to undermine the insurance industry itself. What they witnessed was a bleak picture of continued inaction and delay.
In particular, insurers were unwilling to engage on the topic of new LNG infrastructure, despite it representing an unmitigable risk exposure for insurers, causing untold volatility and liability.
Learn more about the state of the insurance industry in 2025:
French insurers making political excuses
The CEOs of both AXA and SCOR received the Insure Our Future demands, hand-delivered by Reclaim Finance, calling on these insurers to address the insurability crisis by stopping their underwriting and investment support for oil and gas expansion.
Whilst SCOR acknowledged the harmful impacts of new LNG projects, the company does not plan to adopt a policy this year due to the political context in the United States. Meanwhile, AXA still views LNG as a transitional energy source.
AXA and SCOR are placing big bets on LNG, even as LNG markets are plagued by long-term demand uncertainty due to surging clean energy adoption and geopolitical shifts. Investments in renewable energy hit $728 billion last year, with double-digit annual growth, and insurance demand is growing across project construction, operational phases, and new technologies.
German giants: from leaders to laggards
Both Allianz and Munich Re responded to questions asked by Urgewald, and in the case of Munich Re as well a representative of frontline communities affected by LNG terminals, with misinformed ideas about LNG as a source of energy security and a bridge to renewables. Germany can have energy security and independence if it focuses on affordable and cleaner technologies, not by relying on imported fossil fuels.
Neither company is willing to rise to the challenge of becoming climate leaders like Italy’s largest insurer Generali, which overtook Allianz’s top spot on our 2024 Scorecard when it adopted a climate policy to end support for oil and gas expansion across the entire value chain, including new liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals and gas-fired power plants
Munich Re emerges as potentially the biggest backslider. Following the AGM, Munich Re announced that it has withdrawn from climate initiatives including NZAOA, NZAMI, Action 100+ and IIGCC. This reflects a significant step back from its previous leadership on climate.
Swiss insurers are all talk and no walk
Swiss insurers showed their cards this year as Campax’s Nora Scheel reflected after attending Zurich, Swiss Re, and Helvetia’s AGMs, that, “Insurers really only [care] about one thing, profit.” Zurich prefers to take an “engagement” approach with fossil fuel companies, despite the fact that oil and gas companies “engaging in dialogue” are expanding production even though they should have been reducing it long ago.
Meanwhile Swiss Re continues to hide behind elements of the International Energy Agency’s roadmap, the reinsurance giant heavily focuses on how the roadmap assigns a transitional role to gas, rather than acknowledging that there must be a reduction in LNG production to maintain a stable economy and liveable planet.
U.S. insurers on the defense
As climate impacts and the insurance crisis intensify, U.S. insurers continue to be the world’s biggest laggards on climate policies. CCAG attended both The Hartford and Travelers’ AGMs asking questions about the financial risk of insuring fossil fuels while dealing with catastrophic climate losses, only to be met with vague or defensive responses from their CEOs.
Canada’s Fairfax Financial: ignoring shareholder’s climate demands
Investors for Paris Compliance filed a shareholder resolution at Fairfax Financial requesting financed emissions disclosure. Despite management’s 42% voting control, Fairfax privately disclosed that ~60% of independent shareholders supported the proposal. Nonetheless, they refused to publicly break out results and declined a request for transparency or dialogue.
Encouragingly, the high vote shows that the majority of its shareholders want action on climate, yet Fairfax continues to reject climate risk disclosure, fossil fuel exclusions, or net-zero targets.
A system on the brink. Act now or face systemic collapse
The ongoing failure of insurance companies to take action on climate isn’t just harming business – it’s creating profound risk in the wider financial system.
As the physical risks of climate change become ever more apparent, insurers aren’t keeping up. Across the globe, soaring home insurance premiums and disappearing coverage illustrate that the sector is failing to reckon with the threat posed by climate change.
To quote Allianz’ own board member, Dr. Günther Thallinger, “This is not a one-off market adjustment. This is a systemic risk that threatens the very foundation of the financial sector. If insurance is no longer available, other financial services become unavailable too […] This is a climate-induced credit crunch.”
Allianz and other insurance giants would do well to heed this warning and act before it’s too late – by doing everything in their power to stop rising emissions, by recouping climate losses from fossil fuel companies, not citizens, and by ensuring affordable coverage for vulnerable communities.
Read our full demands to insurers here.
