AXA CEO (Insurance): "A 2C World Might Be Insurable, A 4C World Certainly Would Not Be" [View all]

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Henri de Castries, the CEO and Chairman of AXA, one of the world’s largest insurers, has set the bar high for institutional investors when it comes to acting on climate risk and opting for divestment. The French group has more than $1trillion in assets under management.

“It is our responsibility, as a long term institutional investor, to consider carbon as a risk and to accompany the global energy transition. The burning of coal to produce energy is today clearly one of the biggest obstacles preventing us from reaching the 2°C target. For this reason, AXA has decided “to divest from the companies most exposed to coal-related activities for the assets managed internally” said the company in a press release on May 22, 2015.

At a business and climate change conference in Paris that day Mr de Castries stated that AXA would sell €500m ($544m) of coal assets between now and the end of this year. The company also said it would put some €3bn into green investments between now and 2020, mainly in clean technology, green infrastructure and green bonds.

“The debate is no longer about whether, it’s about when. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is unequivocal: the climate system is warming, and many of the observed changes are unprecedented” he told the conference. And he spelt out what this meant for those in the same line of business. “So what does this means concretely for an insurer? Let me start by recalling that insurance stands on two legs: protection – of people, goods and physical assets – on the one side and investments, to enable this protection, on the other. This makes insurance one of the only industries with a role to play in both the adaptation and mitigation aspects of the climate issue” he said.

EDIT

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dinamedland/2015/05/26/a-2c-world-might-be-insurable-a-4c-world-certainly-would-not-be/