Huge Insurance Company Cites Climate Change As Reason For Divesting From Coal

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/22/3662053/axa-insurance-coal-divestment/

by Natasha Geiling Posted on May 22, 2015

Citing climate change as a major threat, one of the world’s largest insurance companies has pledged to drop its remaining investment in coal assets while tripling its investment in green technologies.

At a business and climate change conference held this week in Paris, AXA — France’s largest insurer — announced that it would sell €500 million ($559 million) in coal assets by the end of 2015, while increasing its “green investments” in things like renewable energy, green infrastructure, and green bonds to €3 billion ($3.3 billion) by 2020.

During the announcement on Friday, AXA’s chief executive Henri de Castries spoke about the threat that climate change poses to the environment, and the responsibility of insurance companies to deal with those threats. Last year, AXA paid over €1 billion ($1.1 billion) globally in weather-related insurance claims, citing climate change as a “core business issue” already driving an increase in weather-related risks.

“The facts are undeniable. If we think we can live in a world where temperatures would have increased by more than 2 degrees [Celsius] we’re just fooling ourselves,” de Castries said.

Later, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, de Castries called climate change “an extremely large risk.”

“Insurers are the mirror of what happens in the economy and in the society,” he said. “We try to increase what we do on the prevention side.”

A study published in Nature in January found that in order to limit global warming to 2°C, 80 percent of the world’s current coal reserves would need to remain unused from 2010 and 2050.

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