Transcript provided by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall

I'm Lindsey Hall.

Esther Whieldon

And I'm Esther Whieldon.

Lindsey Hall

Welcome to All Things Sustainable, a podcast from S&P Global. As your hosts we'll dive into all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business growth.

Esther Whieldon

Join us every Friday for in depth analysis and interviews of leaders from around the globe. Together we'll breakdown big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon.

Lindsey Hall

On this podcast we tried to take the temperature of the sustainability world through interviews, through events and through conversations with clients. In 2025 it's no surprise that physical risks from climate change are front and center in many of these discussions.

Esther Whieldon

And increasingly we're also hearing the insurance is a huge focus in conversations about climate change. That's because insurance has implications for a lot of different stakeholders. For example, rising risks from climate hazards like wildfires or severe storms lead to higher insurance premiums, which might make insurance unaffordable for many. And if those hazards are severe enough, they can lead insurers to stop writing policies in a certain market. That means banks then won't write mortgages and that, of course, has knock-on effects for property owners, investors, regulators and policymakers.

Lindsey Hall

We wanted to better understand how the insurance industry is thinking about these topics. So I sat down with Rowan Douglas. Rowan is the CEO of Climate Risk and Resilience at Howden. That's a large insurance and reinsurance broker and risk adviser based in London with operations around the world. We had our conversation on the sidelines of the S&P Global Sustainable1 Summit in London. We'll include a link in our show notes if you'd like to hear more interviews and key takeaways from that event. We'll also include a link to our upcoming summit in Singapore on June 26 in case you'd like to join us there. Okay. Here's Rowan, who starts off by explaining his work at Howden.

Rowan Douglas

My role is to help people quantify and understand their risks as well as opportunities, but primarily their risks to climate, both from obviously, physical and transition risks, see how they can perhaps manage some of those vulnerabilities now and into the future, but also then particularly understand how insurance can be brought to bear to manage that risk, both as a sort of a governance mechanism, but obviously also as a financial derisking mechanism and how that insurance can then have its maximum value in the wider role of investment and banking.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. So I talked to people from lots of different sectors for this podcast. And I have to say, you are the person to talk to right now because everyone is looking to insurance at this moment to understand physical risk of climate change.

Rowan Douglas

Yes, I know. It's quite interesting because I've been lucky enough to be in the industry for quite a long time since the early '90s. And I'm a geographer who ended up working in the city of London. And the insurance, particularly the reinsurance industry, which is where I particularly focused, has had to quantify and translate physics into finance over those 30 years, and it's gone through quite a revolution in the way that it can quantify these risks.

It's a bit of a miracle how they've gone from relative ruin in the early '90s when Hurricane Andrew almost wiped out the market together with some other disasters to now actually, despite increases in events and much greater risk, actually, the industry through incredible science and regulation and indeed, the role of credit ratings actually has made us pretty resilient to what could happen now and actually with a pretty good view about what can happen in the future.

And 10 years ago, when the wider financial community began to get focused on climate risk when Mark Carney arrived at the Bank of England and all those things happened, I imagine that our 2 worlds of sort of insurance and reinsurance and catastrophe risk modeling would come together with banking and investment, and we'd have this incredible sort of fusion and insurance would be seen as having something to offer. It happened a little bit, but I would say that it hasn't happened as much as it could have done.

But now for a whole set of reasons, maybe 10 years later, 2025, that sort of intellectual fusion and interest in how insurance can play its part, I think, has really changed. And it's exciting to at last be not just in the room, but at the table of these discussions. And there's so much opportunity for us all to collaborate and actually S&P is playing its fair share in that, not just creating events like the one we're both at today, but also in bringing our metrics and methodologies across the different cottage industries of finance together.

Lindsey Hall

So for our listeners who maybe haven't been following along and paying close attention to the trends in the insurance reinsurance space. What should they understand about where things stand today when it comes to climate change, physical risk?

Rowan Douglas

Okay. Well, I suppose the first thing to understand is that, as I mentioned, about 30 years ago, the insurance sector had its own sort of climate crisis. They didn't call it climate. They called it natural catastrophe or natural disaster risk. But during the late '80s, early '90s, there was a sequence of unprecedented disasters around the world, which essentially wiped out the industry. Lots of insurance companies went bust around the world.

London, which was an epicenter for reinsurance, protecting these companies, became an epicenter for losses and some of our famous institutions, Lloyd's of London, for example, was almost brought down. But that crisis, as often happens, precipitated a sort of a revolution. It was called strange name, catastrophe risk modeling, but it sort of blended geography with actuarial science and engineering to figure out not what had happened at a place, but what could happen to an asset or a crop or an economy based on the current potential of weather and climate.

It was sort of a philosophical and intellectual revolution, but it began really to help the sector become far more resilient. And investors in the sector said you've got to use these models and regulators who wanted to make sure the promises that insurers are making with their policies had proper resilience and backing. Otherwise, it's a worthless piece of paper. So they created pretty strong resilience requirements, 1 in 200-year resilience for an insurance contract.

So over the last 30 years, despite growing losses, and obviously, we see them all the time, you don't see many headlines these days of insurance companies that are going bust or the reinsurance market in crisis, and it's because actually, we've converted physics into finance quite well. We've got a good gearbox for that. That's the good news. And I think now there's a recognition that the insurance sector can play its part in both helping people understand the current level of risk and extremes where that's heading in the future.

The risk is partly around what the climate can do, but it's often about our own vulnerabilities. But like when we have a medical, a medical determines where we're vulnerable and we do something about it, don't we. That's what we need to do as companies and governments. But of course, then the other challenge is that insurance also helps provide an economic guide for risk. The cost of insurance in many places is going up, and that creates pressures. But in sense, that can be a good pressure because it highlights the challenge.

Of course, it can create the challenge of uninsurability or unaffordability -- and that then needs to be addressed because without insurance, people are realizing that many things can't happen. It affects mortgages, it affects valuations of assets, that's even companies being able to operate. So insurance, I think, from being something that people could broadly speaking, in many parts, at least the developed world take a little bit for granted. That's changing now. And I think with it, the role of insurance as a sort of a strategic sort of asset is going to change.

Lindsey Hall

We heard Rowan mention Mark Carney, and this is a name that came up a lot during our London event, in part because Carney had just been elected Prime Minister of Canada. Throughout the Sustainable1 Summit, I heard people reference Carney and a speech about climate change and financial stability that he made in 2015 back when he was governor of the Bank of England.

In the speech, he famously called climate change the tragedy of the horizon. By this, he meant that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will impose a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix. It's an idea we've discussed a lot on this podcast in the past, the challenge of balancing near-term energy priorities like security and affordability with longer-term sustainability challenges. Okay. Back to my conversation with Rowan.

Rowan Douglas

There's a phrase I'm beginning to hear. I don't know where it originally came from, but I like it. It's insurance is upstream of banking and investment. There is a famous Prime Minister of Barbados, who said a year or 2 ago, countries that are not insurable are not investable. So I think there's a recognition that insurance is absolutely essential to allow credit and investment to flow with confidence. And I suppose insurance in that case becomes a kind of a valve, doesn't it for where investment can go and where it doesn't go.

And hopefully, that can be a useful factor. And the interesting thing is that when insurance becomes unavailable, it actually is a symptom of many things. It may not just be that the risk is growing. And by the risk, people often mean just the hazard, the chances of floods and things. Risk is also caused by the vulnerability of assets to those hazards. And so sometimes, what's driving the losses isn't so much the climate change. It might actually be just how we're organizing ourselves or people not adapting effectively.

We need to help people see the economic value of that. But actually, when you scratch the surface of some of these issues, insurers are not always pulling out because the risk is too great. There may be reasons which are limiting their ability to price effectively. In some jurisdictions, insurance pricing is governed by regulation. And obviously, there are pressures on those who are regulating to keep prices down, and they may potentially suppress the ability of insurers to charge what actuarially effective rates.

And if that happens too much, over time, insurers may feel if they keep making losses that if they can't operate freely, they may have to pull out. So sometimes uninsurability, which I do think is going to become a big theme, there's an important diagnosis. And often, it's -- we're just perhaps not operating a market properly or openly. And then there are broader questions about how we can support those who perhaps for no fault of their own cannot afford insurance or need to be supported and there's ways that governments and the industry can have to think about doing that.

So I think that this issue is suddenly making people really focus on what's driving the risk and what is making the insurance market not operate in certain places. And is it always about the climate? Or is it about other things as well?

Lindsey Hall

And so I think I'm hearing you say it's partly the private sector, but it's also a role for regulators and policy to play.

Rowan Douglas

It is. And actually, insurance is always a product of public policy and regulation, actually also culture. So first and foremost, insurance cannot operate without regulation. It's because it's a very odd sector. You're selling a promise for a price as the seller, the insurance company, you don't know how much that product will cost. Most people sell products, and they know how much it will cost. They charge a bit more for their margin.

Insurance is very different. You charge what you think it will cost on average, but the actual cost could be very different. And it's absolutely essential product. So to avoid insurance companies selling things too cheaply to bring in income, but not having enough resources to pay claims if disasters occur and to make sure that people are treated fairly and the insurance market operates in a sort of open and properly competitive way, it has to be regulated.

And so actually, governments are always somewhere focused in how insurances operates in jurisdictions. And in most countries, I think I could be wrong, but I don't think there's now an OECD country where sort of disaster insurance, property insurance for properties for homes, particularly is a purely private sector activity. There's always usually some sort of government role in providing some sort of backstop as happens in Britain with a mechanism that's coordinated through public policy called Flood Re.

In America, you have a variety of systems that help to make insurance more perhaps accessible, the National Flood Insurance Program, for example, or in the U.S. I think about half of the agricultural crop insurance premium that's provided through the private sector, but with a sort of a public sector framework. I think about half of that is subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer. So insurance is always actually a public-private venture, but I think now that balance is going to come even more scrutinized.

Lindsey Hall

And to your point, this is not new for the insurance industry, doing this forever. Why does it feel like it's coming to the fore at this moment?

Rowan Douglas

Well, ultimately, because the risks are growing, and they're growing faster than people realize because the climate is changing more quickly than people thought would happen. But also our vulnerabilities are increasing. In the U.S., people are moving south. They're moving to the coasts. We're not perhaps evolving our building codes and our standards as quickly. So our exposure, what we have, where we have it and our values are growing, our vulnerabilities are growing. So that would increase losses anyway.

But of course, then you've got climate as a sort of relentless change. So risk is growing. People realize they need more protection. This is creating more demand. This means insurance prices are going up because they have to reflect the level of risk. And from being something that's been relatively marginal, it's now becoming a bit more of a significant cost and in some places, very significant.

And other economic actors, not least lenders and investors are also now becoming aware that this is something that they may not have fully accounted for, but this is an issue that they need to manage and they may want to think about having insurance or their customers having insurance and then they maybe can't get insurance. So I think it's this essentially cost and scarcity and now a new understanding the implications of that. We often take things for granted when we've never had to think about them not being there. And I think that's what's beginning to happen.

Lindsey Hall

The models that you're using or that the insurance industry is using, are they all backward looking? Or are they projections into the future?

Rowan Douglas

Yes. As I said that we had this sort of revolution about 30 years ago that basically said old claims files aren't enough to understand. It's now become forward-looking as well. What's the true risk now? And first and foremost, that the past is very important just because the climate is changing, it doesn't mean to say the historical record isn't very important for understanding patterns and levels of risks.

It's also very important for understanding the relationship between events, different types of storm, different types of flood, different sorts of wind speeds and the damage that those do. One of the key facets or attributes of a risk model is actually the vulnerability function, the fragility functions. And so I always get a little bit concerned when people say, insurance is backward looking. That the past is really important for training models. But of course, you then need to condition those models or adjust them to take account of current climate conditions to start with, what's current climate chemistry doing to the distribution of tropical cyclones.

They're generally moving forwards because the waters are warmer. There's a tendency perhaps them to become more powerful, if not more frequent. So each peril, each hazard, as we say, will have its distribution. So the industry is pretty good at understanding current levels of risk. And essentially, what you do is you then look at climate models to help understand what future patterns of hazard will likely do and you recondition, you rerun your models. We've just done this for a big project for the European Investment Bank and the European Commission on the future agricultural risk in Europe.

So the insurance sector has got a pretty good gearbox for doing this. Up until now, it's only been required through its products and its regulation to really look at current and near future risk. But fundamentally, there's nothing that stops the industry using these incredibly powerful tools to actually look further into the future. And I'm excited actually that finally, it's taking a long time, that important community, which is mainly in the insurance sector, but also in parts of academia is now linking with the more mainstream, if I could put it like that sustainability and climate community and bringing these 2 worlds together and get the best of both. And I think that will be hugely helpful.

Lindsey Hall

This idea we just heard from Rowan is something we spend a lot of time on at S&P Global, working to connect the dots between, say, our Chief Economist and our climate scientists. How do you close the gap? And how do you get them speaking the same language? And how do you make that language accessible to the broader public? This is actually the focus of our first ever Climate Summit in New York City on June 5.

It was hosted by the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence, which is home to world-class scientists. And the inaugural summit convened many of those scientists alongside financial institutions and industry leaders to help answer the question, how do you translate the science into plain English and actionable insights for financial decision makers? We'll include a link in our show notes if you'd like to learn more about the Climate Center of Excellence. Okay. Here's Rowan again, talking about the need to break down silos between different stakeholders.

Rowan Douglas

You need economists, you need the climate scientists. You actually also need, if I may say, the engineers actually. You need the people who are understanding the ratio between, if you like, the physics and the assets, what is going to happen to crops, what's going to happen to buildings and then translate that into the financing economics. And of course, in our mind, Howden, climate is, in some sense, is just one subset of something bigger called nature.

So you very quickly get into wider-related issues of water and the distribution of ecosystems and our dependency on those. So it's one of these subjects, which the challenge is, of course, it's so vast, but we have to try and break it down to its sort of essence. And I think actually, those are coming together of some of the key metrics and things which will matter.

Lindsey Hall

You're definitely speaking my language on bringing nature into the equation and how does that relate to climate change?

Rowan Douglas

No, I mean the climate is just one facet. It's one input. We have all the other inputs that we depend on. And the other thing that insurance is quite good at is valuing things through that sort of relationship with the liability side of the balance sheet. The challenge of the nature is no one owns it, and there's no income stream.

How do you value it? Well, you value it by saying, what would be the impact if it wasn't there or it was diminished. What impact would that have on your income on your value? What's the likelihood of that happening over the next 12 months, maybe over the next 50 years? And then you can impute a probability of that and you can begin to impute a value.

And then you can begin to impute a value of, well, what's the economic rationale for helping to prevent that. And so I think insurance could also help in some of these philosophical sort of challenges about how do we retrain the invisible hands to give value to things that currently perhaps we don't.

Lindsey Hall

Is this already happening, do you think?

Rowan Douglas

Absolutely, yes. No, we were lucky enough to be involved in some research, which has now been applied actually, I guess, 2 examples. One was looking at the cost benefit of managing forests in California a few years ago, I did some work with the then Insurance Commissioner of California looking at if we managed wild forests differently, could we reduce the fire risk and then reduce the insurance premiums, which were going to be charged, making sure it's more affordable?

And yes, we did the research and showed that basically you could reduce the risk by about 40%, which would have the attendant improvement on insurance protection. And then there's some examples of that now be put into place or helping people understand the value of coral reefs. Not many people know this, but you can now ensure coral reefs because coral reefs provide important support for, obviously, fishers, for storm surge protection, for attraction of hotels. If coral reefs are damaged through storm surges or leaching events, believe it or not, you can do things to help corals grow back and be supported.

So -- we put in place programs for coral reefs to be protected through parametric insurance because many stakeholders have an interest in that. They've worked out the economic risk and benefit of protecting it so that when it is damaged, a, they get some money to support them during the transition, maybe pay fishers not to fish there for a couple of years, but also you can improve the recovery of the coral roof.

And so these communities have come together through a trust and people pay into that trust and the payout happens. And the other thing is you don't need to own an asset to have an insurable interest in it. So insurance is sort of -- it's a strange corner of finance, which has a few attributes, which are pretty helpful for nature. We can value things that have an income stream, and we can protect things that "no one owns." That's a good thing for nature.

Lindsey Hall

For audience who might not be familiar with the term parametric insurance, can you briefly define that?

Rowan Douglas

Yes, absolutely. So it's an area of insurance, which has been around for about 30 years, but like many things, it's been a slow burn, but it's now sort of picking up. And broadly speaking, most of us when we buy insurance, we have a house. We've got a specific asset we need to protect, and we protect against a range of things that could happen, but we don't have to specify exactly the level of flood.

So we're essentially assuring an asset. Some people can say, well, I'm also worried about insuring myself against a specific type of event. So imagine you're the government of a Caribbean Island and these sorts of products are sold to Caribbean Islands. You know that a Cat 3, 4 or 5 hurricane coming too close is going to do your economy quite a bit of damage. You can model that. Cat 3 will do so much, a Cat 4 will do a lot more and a Cat 5 will do an awful lot more.

We can work out the probabilities on an annualized basis of how likely that is to happen. And so the government doesn't know exactly which buildings will be destroyed. It doesn't know exactly which hart of the island will be most badly. But it knows it's going to overall have a big loss. So you can essentially insure against a Cat 3 hurricane coming, and you'll see the track coming from NOOA or whatever. And if it comes within a specific area at a specific strength, then essentially you will get a payout.

And so parametric means essentially using an index using some sort of parameter to represent a risk. And this now is happening in all sorts of areas where farmers can buy insurance to protect themselves against a deficit of rainfall or you can use insurance even to protect yourselves against wildfire using satellite pictures to essentially say if you have too many pixels in your stretch of wild forest, which have been burned as opposed to showing different results from the satellites, then essentially you're essentially insuring against the outputs of satellites. That's what's happening.

And the great thing is it's important, obviously, for those of us living in Europe and North America, but satellites today work just as well in Africa as they do in Latin America. So there's lots of innovation happening actually in this area in developing and emerging economies often supported through development banks and donors and things. And actually, that's been the pioneer of this sort of work for the last 20 years or so.

And suddenly, all those innovations, which were sort of an expertise from the global South is now actually being sort of migrating north as North America and Europe and others are facing similar challenges now. And so it's an exciting area also where actually financial markets can begin to come and work more easily together because these sorts of indices become very flexible for how you could sort of protect other financial instruments like bonds and things.

Imagine we could wrap municipal bonds with some sort of parametric protection. So if the city gets hit and their municipal bonds are under strain, there could be an automatic sort of payout that supports the repayment of that municipal bond or it could happen even with perhaps a sovereign bond for a small island developing state. So parametric insurance is an area where lots of people are quite excited about the integration of insurance with other parts of finance, which is something that I'm very passionate about because I think we've been separate communities for far too long and maybe through climate, we can come together again.

Lindsey Hall

We heard Rowan mention a couple of terms there. NOOA, that's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce with a mission to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts to share that knowledge and information with others and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.

Rowan also discussed Cat 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes. As a reminder, hurricane intensity is labeled on a range from Category 1 or Cat 1 on the low end, up to Category 5 or Cat 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale and major hurricanes are defined as those Category 3 and above. If you'd like to learn more, we'll include a link in our show notes to the forecast for the 2025 hurricane season from scientists at the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence.

Now earlier in the conversation, Rowan mentioned the lack of adaptation measures. And I wanted to follow up here because I'm increasingly hearing a focus on adaptation. For context, as climate change accelerates, one option is to mitigate or take steps to reduce emissions. But as it becomes increasingly clear that many companies and countries will not meet their energy transition goals through mitigation alone, we're hearing an increasing emphasis on climate adaptation. Adaptation refers to measures to prepare for and adjust to current and future climate change impacts. And I asked Rowan, how should our listeners think about adaptation in the insurance context?

Rowan Douglas

When I think about adaptation, I think about insurability obviously. When one thinks about adaptation, one is thinking about more important things like making sure houses are still standing when storms happen or making sure crops are still growing. Ultimately, adaptation is about survival and economic well-being. But again, I think insurance has got a role to play because it's like having a medical, okay?

One of the most important thing that we all need to know at the moment is when it comes to climate, where are our vulnerabilities? What things do we need to fix to make sure that we are as resilient as possible? What part of our building perhaps is the most vulnerable to a storm? And if we make sure that the roof is more secure, that's actually going to have a massive impact on the safety of our building. If we perhaps increase our supply of irrigation a little bit, it's going to make a huge difference to our resilience.

So when we have a medical basically usually highlights where you should be thinking where your vulnerabilities might be, maybe your blood pressure is a bit high or you're a little bit overweight or whatever it might be. And you come with from the medical and you think I'm going to deal with that vulnerability because I don't want to have a more significant visit to the doctor in 2 or 3 years' time. And that's kind of where we are with climate.

And the modeling that insurers use to actually understand and price risk, one of the absolute key parts of those models is understanding the vulnerabilities. That's why when we fill out our sort of insurance policy for our house, that's matter fill in all these details. And of course, actually, they match that with lots of other information they can get now about everyone's property.

And really, what they're working at is a vulnerability function. And what's exciting to me is V isn't for victory anymore. Well, victory is through vulnerability. If we can reduce our vulnerabilities, we reduce our risk, reduce the amount of insurance we need to buy and what it will cost, but more importantly, it will make us more resilient. And adaptation is ultimately about reducing our vulnerability functions.

And what I'm excited about is, a, we've got now the ways of evaluating that in terms of helping people decide what they should adapt to, but also putting an economic value to that. And I think once we have to account for our climate risk as a contingent liability formally, as actually insurers have to. I think then it will give the economic rationale of retraining visible hand to make it economically attractive for people to undertake those adaptation investments, not just because if and when an event occurs, I'll be in a better position, but actually, they'll be rewarded for that every year because their risk has been reduced, they'll get cheaper insurance and actually maybe they'll get better access to credit and even investment. So it's all about economics in the end and retraining the visible hand.

Lindsey Hall

Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Before we go, is there anything I haven't asked about you think is important to get across to our listeners?

Rowan Douglas

I think all I would say is that I think all of us in the world of finance have got something to offer, and we've got something to learn from each other. And I think to some degree, this area of physical climate risk has been a real challenge for so many of us. But I think between us all, if we're open-minded and prepared, all of us have a degree of humility. I think if we can combine our capabilities, but also, frankly, be prepared to take the medical.

Until we actually are prepared to take the medical and probably take a bit of a haircut on valuations and things in the short term to then actually have the incentive to build up those valuations again through adaptation, resilience and dare I say, insurance, I think that's a good thing. So I think we're getting to the point now where we've got to confront this growing risk, but I feel that there's a good opportunity, and I know S&P have got a great role to play in that.

Esther Whieldon

I like what he said about medicals. He said the way insurers are thinking about understanding climate vulnerabilities is similar to the way routine doctor visits can identify health vulnerabilities.

Lindsey Hall

Yes, me too. And we heard today how the insurance industry has evolved in the way it approaches climate risk over several decades. Rowan said there's now recognition that the insurance sector can play its part in both helping people understand current levels of risk and extremes and also where that's heading in the future. And he explained why many companies and investors look to insurance as an economic guide for risk and the risks are growing faster than many people realize because the climate is changing so rapidly. As the cost of insurance in many places is going up, that's creating pressure on everyone from customers and lenders to investors and regulators.

Esther Whieldon

He also talked about the need to bring together stakeholders from all different backgrounds from the insurance industry, academia, economics, engineering, all of these are needed to solve for climate risk. This is something we've heard a lot on this podcast in the past and we'll continue to cover in future episodes.

Lindsey Hall

Thanks for tuning into this episode of All Things Sustainable. If you like what you heard, please subscribe, share and leave us a review everything about the podcast.

Esther Whieldon

And a special thanks to our agency partner, the 199. See you next time.

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