The warped economics of insuring climate destruction

THE United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative carries an emotive photograph on its insurance website – a colourful view of Venice, perhaps the best-known global city to face a biblical scale, climate change-induced flood risk. The image’s none-too-subtle message is made all the more poignant by a one-line statement that dominates the middle of the page: “The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) was discontinued as of 25 April 2024.”

The NZIA was ahead of its time – and not in a good way. The initiative had been launched less than three years before that, to help green the insurance industry and nudge the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable energy sources. It was killed off nine months before an explicitly pro-fossil fuel, climate-change denier arrived in the White House.

Donald Trump’s election as US president also spiked the NZIA’s sister organisation, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, which in mid-January abruptly dropped its net-zero commitment and hid its listing of members (just as they began quitting the organisation).