News
HRH launches the ClimateWise principles for the British insurance industry
12th September 2007
The Prince of Wales today launched a new initiative to help the insurance industry tackle climate change.
His Royal Highness said insurance companies had an important role to play in encouraging more environmentally friendly behaviour.
The Prince was speaking at the launch of the ClimateWise principles - a set of measures designed to promote greener customer practices.
Two of The Prince's charities, The Prince of Wales’s Business in the Environment Programme and Business in the Community, have worked with the insurance sector for the past year to develop the ideas.
Thirty eight insurance companies have already signed up to the strategy including the top 10 largest UK firms. By doing so, they recognise at Board level that climate change has significant social and economic impacts and will incorporate it into their business strategy and planning. They commit to publishing an annual statement detailing their actions on these principles.
In his speech, The Prince said: "I really don't need to remind you that no one takes a longer term or more carefully calculated view of the future than the insurance sector.
"There can be few other sectors which are so directly affected at the end of the day by climate change."
Over the past year leading members of the industry have been working together to come up with six key principles which they believe will promote action on climate change.
They include promoting pay as you go motoring policies and discounts for greener vehicles and offering homeowners advice on how to make their houses more eco-friendly.
The group responsible for the initiative came together at the suggestion of The Prince to find ways of tackling global warming.
"I felt that if insurance companies could take a strategic view across all aspects of what they do and look at the problem as part of the whole business it might just make a difference," he told the Association of British Insurers climate change conference.
He said he would now like to see the initiative taken on by other sectors of the business community and society.
"Until recently climate change was perceived as a problem for the next generation. Now scientists are saying the problem is so grave and so urgent that we have less than 10 years to slow, stop and reverse greenhouse gas emissions.
"I have said it before and I will say it again, we have to think of this as if we were in a wartime situation," he said.
The Prince said the human cost of climate change was brought home to him this summer as he stood with families in Yorkshire and Gloucestershire whose homes had been devastated by flooding.
"What we have witnessed in this country recently and in the United States two years ago is bad enough. But perhaps the great injustice of climate change is that it is poor people and poorer nations that are clearly going to suffer most from it and yet have contributed least to the problem," he said.
The Prince said rich countries in the northern hemisphere have a responsibility to take the necessary action.
"These principles set out a common platform to take forward the measures that the insurance companies need to put in place to help business and society make the changes needed to tackle climate change," he said.
Click here to read The Prince’s speech.
Click here to visit the ClimateWise website.