CLIMATE CHANGE ROADMAP

Pillar One: Meeting Net Zero by 2050

The UK Insurance and Long-term Savings sector is committed to
reaching Net Zero by 2050 and to the global target of a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 – in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Paris Climate Goals.

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Pillar Two: Unleashing Investment Capacity

The industry has a key role in providing the scaled investment capacity that will be needed to phase out carbon-intensive activities and replace them with sustainable and renewable innovations.

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Pillar Three: Sustainable Industry Operations

The Insurance and Long-Term Savings sector aims to reach Net Zero within its own directly controlled operations by 2025. By 2030, we aim to have engaged pro-actively with suppliers to include supply chain emissions within the scope of the sector’s target of reducing overall emissions by 50%.

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Pillar Four: Helping Society Adapt

We can also play a wider role in helping the customers and stakeholders that we work with adapt to a changing climate – helping them take action to reduce emissions, mitigate the impact of temperature rises and become more resilient to the effects of a changing climate.

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Our Climate Change Roadmap: Progress Update

Our Climate Change Roadmap was first published in 2021, setting milestones that must be met by 2025 to keep our sector on track halving emissions by 2030 and reaching Net Zero by 2050.

It focuses primarily on our sector’s role in supporting the delivery of the UK’s Energy Security and Net Zero strategy, identifying areas where our diverse membership can collaborate to drive meaningful action.

Publishing the Roadmap was intended to be the starting point for raising the ambition of our own membership and our wider sector in addressing climate change.

Our Roadmap was developed by a Board sub-group of CEOs in 2021, with the intention that it would help the wider sector benchmark themselves against best practice.

We continue to encourage members to do more on climate change, through our status as an ‘Accelerator’ for the UN-backed ‘Race To Zero’ campaign. Our work to raise awareness and promote best practice includes our annual Climate Summits, our programme of Climate Clinics (in partnership with KPMG) and roundtables to raise awareness.

We have also submitted detailed responses to the UK Government’s Green Finance Strategy consultation and the Rt Hon Chris Skidmore’s independent review of Net Zero.

We also work to provide guidance to members on key topics, to emphasise how insurance and long-term savings can make a contribution.

This includes:

Our newly published Guide To Action on Nature
Our 2022 guidance on Green Supply Chains
Our work to contribute to the outputs of the Climate Financial Risk Forum

To coincide with our 2023 Climate Summit, we have also updated our Climate Change Roadmap to ensure it reflects the current status of our activities.

We hope that this will remain the first port-of-call for those within our sector looking to take action on climate change.

We also committed to providing an annual update on our progress in driving forward the work outlined in the Roadmap. We have provided updates on the progress made on each of our four pillars since the Roadmap was launched, and then identified the actions we want to see in the following twelve months.

We conducted a pulse survey across our membership to measure progress against the Roadmap milestones. Two years on from launching our Roadmap, we remain confident that the majority of our members will meet the 2025 milestones it sets.

Across the whole sector, good progress is being made setting targets and preparing Transition Plans:

28 out of 33 respondents (84%) have already set a Net Zero target that has been approved by their Boards and are already developing their Net Zero Transition Plan, well in advance of this becoming mandatory.
Of these, 23 targets have published for external scrutiny and 24 now cover Scopes 1,2 and 3 emissions in full (while others are still working on establishing a target to cover Scope 3 emissions)
5 of our members have already published their Transition Plans – and we expect more to follow soon
30 out of 33 respondents are on track to reach the 2025 milestone for directly controlled emissions

Even in the context of ongoing pressures on energy security and living costs, the risks of failing to tackle climate change are so severe that we have to stay focussed on delivering on the four pillars of our Roadmap.