Webinar: Insurability as the compass for navigating the resilient low-carbon transition 2025

In this IIL reinsurance webinar, Rowan Douglas summarises how insurance has been essential in enabling previous industrial and technological transitions and the related economic and social challenges these have produced. The speaker outlines how insurance and insurability will be the practical means for navigating pathways toward a resilient, low-carbon and just transition by balancing the trade-offs and sharing the risks that will be necessary at local to global scales in the years and decades ahead.

The insurance sector enabled previous industrial transitions to proceed at the speed and scale desired by industrialists, investors and Governments. The boilers of the mid-19th century were only made bankable by the safety standards and protection imposed by new insurance policies; the growing cities of the late 19th century were only made fire resilient through the science-based safety conditions imposed by underwriters, and the human dislocation and uncertainty caused by these upheavals were managed by the social insurance revolution of the 20th century. The climate transition of the 21st century is requiring the insurance industry and the wider finance, corporate, and public sectors to relearn these lessons quickly.

In this session, Rowan provides examples of how insurance is beginning to unlock the capital required to scale and accelerate risk-informed lending and investment across different classes of re/insurance. He also outlines how much more there is to do and how insurance is set to have growing importance and influence in the late 2020s and 2030s.

Learning objectives

• The Insurability Framework
• How re/insurance-based risk modelling methodologies and metrics will become more widely adopted across the wider financial marketplace and reveal contingent liabilities more clearly. An example of this is the recent work by Howden and the European Investment Bank on EU Agri climate risks
• How this risk modelling is the basis for understanding climate vulnerabilities and related adaptation and resilience priorities and cost-benefits
• How insurance needs to be treated as a form of contingent capital to support the foundation of the capital stack upon which more secure lending and investment can be made

Speakers

• Rowan Douglas CBE, CEO, Climate Risk and Resilience, Howden Group
• Chair: Ben Rose, President & Co-Founder, Supercede