Shaun Tarbuck:

Hello, everybody. And welcome to this, the fifth in the series of webinars, as we lead up to the ICMIF conference in Rome. This particular webinar, we’re going to be talking about mutual and cooperative sustainability models and how our members are taking action towards a better future.

I’m joined today by Liam Carter. The two of us are going to go through various different parts of the sustainability journey that we’ve been through. By all means, do ask questions in the question box as we go through, but we’re hoping, if you’re watching this live, then you can ask questions. Obviously, if you are watching this on record at a later stage, then please do reach out to us at any stage. We run a lot of sustainability discussions with our members. And certainly, they’re increasing on a regular basis now. Almost daily, not so almost weekly now that we have a conversation with a member about setting a new sustainability strategy.

What we thought we’d tried to do here is put it into a webinar for you to make it easier. There is an urgency. We all know that. I don’t need to go into that in depth. Antonio Guterres stated, “We are in a race against time.” Now, if I look back to COP21 in Paris in 2015, I would definitely say at that stage, it was a coming together of business, civil society, and all of the others that are engaged, the NGOs that are engaged in trying to help deliver a safer planet, a safer world, a world for our children to grow up in.

It was a seminal moment, as we all know. Paris alignment and all of this sorts of stuff. But if we roll onto COP26, which every COP is meant to report back every five years as to how the governments have done. I think and if I was to look at COP26, which was in Glasgow last year, the big difference to me was that the business world was far more integrated into making actions that are going to help deliver a safer planet. I think COP21, everyone was, “Oh, maybe we should talk to each other, maybe not.”

But now, what we’re seeing is that we spend five years getting to know each other, which you could say is wasted time, but I think it is needed. And we’ve seen this in a number of different forums that we’ve been engaged in. But I think COP26 is now about, “We really need to do this.” As Antonio Guterres says, “It is a race against time now.” And we do really need to start making some big inroads.

And I think the acceptance of the business world into this discussion, because ultimately, the COPs are about governments delivering. Not about the private sector. I do believe now it is about the private sector in which the mutuals are a key part of that. And that hence why we’ve started to see an awful lot more people coming to us and saying, “Well, how do we engage? How do we do our bit?” And I think what we’re hoping to see now is that the mutual sector is doing a lot more than it ever used to. And we’ll start to be leading in a number of areas in which we’re particularly strong at.

Throughout the presentation here, we are going to try and reflect where all the different members are at different stages. And to help you identify where you are in the journey in your company. But also, those that are leading the way and how we can cascade that knowledge. And help everyone really catch up and get to a good point where they’re comfortable that they’re doing what they can do in order to be a sustainable business coming forward. Which if we look at it in terms of where the industry’s headed, we do believe organizations leading with purpose, which we do, are going to be the future of the insurance sector. And everyone is trying to come into that particular space.

Here’s a quick canter through where sustainability has come from since we’ve really engaged in it, in our terms and probably since 1995. For some of our members it’s even earlier than that. We have stolen this slightly with Swiss Re. They’ve co-created it with us. Sustainably 1.0 is about having conversations for many insurers. I’m not saying the mutual sector particularly, but many insurers, it was about excluding risks that were associated with climate change. But for some of the earlier ones, it was about really channel or activism and trying to get engaged and find out where the challenges can be met.

Sustainability 2.0 was in 2006. And that was the formation of the United Nations principles for responsible investing. The PRI as is now known. Folksam was one of the family members of that. It was a group of segment that founded that originally insurers. And they’re trying to embed the ESG factors into investments and their ownership decisions. Again, shareholder actors really started on mass at that particular stage. That really is sustainably 2.0. For many people, that is where they are at the moment, somewhere between two and three.

Sustainability 3.0. And I do believe we’ve been given a gift in the sustainable development goals developed in 2015. The early movers adopted these quite quickly. But for many, we’re right at the stage of, “Well, what do we do and how do we do it?” And hopefully, we’ll answer those questions as we go through the presentation, but that’s more about measuring the impact.

The majority of businesses, as I said are between two and three. Three being more impactive. And also looking at some of the new agreements that are coming out under Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, which everyone can get engaged in. We’re seeing a lot of members signing up to these global agreements and commitments to show that they’re actually moving in the right direction.

I’m going to hand over now to Liam to start talking about sustainability strategies and the different areas where we can get engaged.

Liam Carter:

Perfect. Thank you, Shaun. I think what a great way to start this session. And I really thank you all for joining us. This is not an exhaustive list of what all our members are doing. I think it’s important to understand. If you are watching and you have something to contribute to any of these points, please make sure that you get hold of either Shaun or myself so that we can make sure we’ve got you on our radar. And that we can share all the good work that’s being done across our membership. Let’s kick into it.

From a sustainability strategy perspective, most of our members are looking at, or considering four basic levers for action that they are working on. And that is sustainable community and communities, sustainable operations, sustainable investing and stakeholder engagement. And each one of those things have different permutations for each business. Some are doing a lot more of one and less the other. But we’re here to take you through a couple of those examples and hopefully spark a bit of interest and a broader conversation amongst our members for this.

What do you mean when we talk about each four of these areas? From sustainable community, we are looking at really fostering sustainable practices into the business from start to finish. We’ll go through a little bit more detail or potential key areas for that in the next couple of slides. Sustainable operations. Really about leading through action and leading through example. Sustainable investing is really looking at what you’re doing with your money and how you’re making sure that that counts. And stakeholder engagements it’s really about living and breathing these messages throughout organization and into your communities and other broad stakeholders.

I think if you take anything from this section, it’s really about these four areas, plus your action. And most importantly, doing well by doing good. Which is really intrinsically linked with purpose-led organizations, which is what we are all about and what our conference is leading up to. A little bit high level, but some things for you to think about when considering your own sustainability strategy.

Sustainable communities, it’s really about leading with purpose, educating through your engagement with your members and selling sustainability through all of your work. Really, about embedding sustainability principles and practices into even your policies and your engagements with your teams around that. And really, about ensuring resilience. That’s something that’s close to all of our members. Part of the moment is being sustainable through resilience practices.

Sustainable operations. This is something that I think a lot of our members are doing really well. Shaun, we’ve been speaking about quite a few examples earlier. And something that people have been doing for a long time. It’s really walking the talk. It’s green businesses, it’s paperless businesses. It’s really doing the easy wins that you can do that you can make changes in your business that are going to help with the sustainability and agenda.

Investing is also something that we see a lot of our members are doing. And it’s really about investing impact. It’s about investing to prevent. It’s about doing the right things with your money. And stakeholder engagement is really about being one with your staff, being one with your service providers and being one with your communities, all within a sustainability kind of framework. I think the important things to take here are how this transfers into business value. And most importantly, sustainable community is about protecting your members and protecting those around you.

Operations is actually about making operational savings for a lot of people that a lot of our businesses now, are making huge savings on being sustainable. Investing is about getting better returns and sustainable investments are just good business investments. Shaun will take you through a little bit more detail later on. And I think the big call for action is that we are all in this together. And I think it’s something that we do forget, but there is only one planet and this is ours. Anything I’m missing out there, Shaun?

Shaun Tarbuck:

No, that’s a good summary, I think. Just to capitalize on that, there’s good business around all of this. If we do good, we will do well in our business. And I think that should be always focused on in terms of driving this change.

Liam Carter:

Some of the great examples that we have seen, that we know from our members, and I’m going to talk about this very high level, but the impact here is to see how much is being done amongst various members from different parts of the world. But examples around sustainable community. We are seeing members that are putting a lot of time and money and building vegetable gardens, building sustainable farming initiatives within their communities to feed the communities. They’re putting investments, they’re putting time, they’re putting technical expertise in. And really getting the fruits of that labor for their local communities.

There’s a lot of our members who support their staff as well as their communities through mental health initiatives. Specifically around the troubles that we’ve had over the last couple of years with the pandemic and working from home, a lot of our members are investing into the kind of communities and their staff by helping with that. We have members who are putting in 100 million dollars into agricultural bonds. Moving onto investments, we’ve got example of one of our members who’s the world’s larger green bond investor. That happens to be Folksam.

We’ve got members who are investing in autonomic cars and buses to really help bring down carbon emissions in their cities and help drive people around. I think leaning into sustainable operations, just to stay on the commuting thought train, we’ve got members who are actively putting commuter routes to work where people can carpool. Can really make sure that they bring down their emissions by traveling together.

From an operations perspective, we have many members who are going completely green or as green as possible. One of our members has got, I think, every flat or every roof on any one of these buildings with a solar panel, making them completely green. Which is a great example. And loads of you are doing great things around paperless policies. And I think stakeholder engagements is a big one that we do see. And we’re not seeing enough of. There are programs from many of our members, engage in the communities, but there is never enough. I think we can always see more.

I think the message here really is that it doesn’t matter what you do. You just have to do something. And you can just, the plethora of different example, you can just see on this. It’s only a small minutia of what our members are doing. But the secret is, is to try and look at it in this four box system. And which ones are you doing? Which ones should you be doing? And where can you do more? Where can you keep stepping and what actions can you do to help? That would be the message I’d give that this is just a tiny portion of what our members are doing.

And most importantly, if you are doing anything that we are not mentioning, please let me know. We would love to share and to make it part of our broader discussions. I think this is I’ll hand over to Shaun. What does the future look like for our members?

Shaun Tarbuck:

Sustainability advantage. I’m sorry it’s a little bit busy here, but I’m trying to encapsulate everything that we are doing and the members are doing in their journeys. When we talk about setting a mutual business strategy, to me, there are four buckets, as we’ve said, investment, underwriting, prevention and social.

From the ESG side, you’ll see the top part of the slide there. Sustainability, 1.0 and 2.0, the ESG. Under investments, you can tick all three, ES and G. And the underwriting is definitely the environment. Under prevention, its environment and social. And under social, it’s definitely social. And that will come to the areas in which we can make a difference in those. The levers are action of how ICMIF is happening. Under investment, we’ve got all the member commitments. We’ll come to that in a minute. We are corralling around the net zero commitments. That Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance is bringing together. As well as which is part of the principles for responsible investing.

Under the underwriting, we’re developing the ICMIF mutual iSDG calculator in partnership with Swiss Re and many of the members. And that we hope will be then scaled up into a global standard through the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, which is the principles for sustainable insurance. Sorry about all the acronyms. But then the prevention, the work we’re doing for disaster risk reduction in the working group and the benchmark we’re creating with members in the UNDRR. And under the social it’s those that are engaging through the ICMIF Foundation and the 5-5-5, which is also being assisted by the UN Development Program and InsuResilience.

All of these different areas, you can see, we have a member commitment, but we also have a bigger picture, which is bringing in the UN or the wider industry. In order to start your journey, I think the essential bit there is to make a commitment to the future. And that will then start to lead into the SDGs, which is why we’re providing at least two benchmarks at the moment, which we will be launching at the ICMIF conference. One on prevention and one on the SDG underwriting side.

Just by way of example, and this is changing almost monthly. And these are 13 organizations, members that have made a commitment. Some of those are just starting out. They’ve just made what we would call a commitment. That’s a commitment to make change. Some of those are quite early, as they’re trying to find out the best ways to make sure that they are net zero by at least 2050, which is what the governments have to do or should do.

You’ll see that net zero commitments mean they’ve made a net zero commitment to the whole business. For instance, you’ve got Folksam there by 2050. You’ve got Desjardings there by 2040. You’ve got others that are making 2040, 2050. That tends to be the area in between there that we’ve got. But then, the important bit here is to make a commitment. And that might be a commitment to be 20% impact investing by 2025 or 2030. It might be being operationally mutual net zero by say 2022 or 2023.

Some of the things you can do earlier and the important bit is to have a sliding role to make that commitment. And for some of the members that we’re hearing just recently, it’s about first of all, the board making a commitment to be sustainable and to embed that in their business. And that’s fine. We all got to get somewhere. We’ve got to start somewhere. As I say, we can learn from those that are further advanced than many of the others.

At that stage, I’m going to talk a little bit more about the investment piece. Many of you have helped us with the investment survey, that we have done an investment survey we’ve done for the last three years. We’re currently compiling the data for this for 2021. We’ll release that in time for the conference. But I think we had 39 members that contributed. That’s 25% of the members, but it’s actually 78% of the assets under management, which are about 1.6 trillion of assets under management. That’s worth remembering. Overall, that’s $2 trillion in investible assets is what the members have.

But the key findings from there is that last year, 2020, we had $576 billion of assets under management that were invested in accordance with sustainable investment framework. The big thing here is it’s been doubling year on year. If we can double it again, that’d be over a trillion. I don’t expect that because that’s a big leap, but it’d be great if we can get certainly somewhere around 700, 800 billion this year. And that will be totally industry leading.

If you look at that in percentage terms, we’re already in 2020 with 25% of our investable assets or probably with those numbers, at nearly a third actually. Whereas normally, a shareholder based company would be looking at three to 5%. I think we’re way ahead of the market in this area and collectively well ahead.

For those that may remember the story of when I spoke at the United Nation General Assembly in 2014, and on behalf of the whole industry committed that we would reach 400 billion by 2020. ICMIF’s done that by itself. Give yourselves all a pat on the back. We’re there and we continue to drive this forward. The frameworks-wise, the most popular is the PR I, but there are others out there. And it doesn’t really matter which one, but I think the leading one is the PRI.

And just when we drill down a little bit further into what those investments are, there are specific ones that are very targeted on being green. And that would be impact investing for instance, which is the next level of ESG. We’re seeing a doubling every year of that from our members. The same with the green bonds, blue bonds, social bonds, resilience bonds, whatever you want to call them. Bonds for good. Again, a doubling of that every year.

And the same with renewable energy stocks and just direct investments into renewable energy, which we need even more now with what’s going on in the world. Again, doubling every year. That is a good sign. And when it comes down, we also ask in the survey what members are doing and how they’re reporting their sustainability. And there’s no right or wrong answer here, but still, half of our members that responded are saying they’re still doing a separate sustainability report. Around 25% are saying they’re doing integrated reporting and some are still planning to do it. But you can see that how many are reporting against the SDGs. In 2020, there were about 14.

These are the ones that are reporting against primarily. And again, it’s still early days. Some started doing this round of 2017, 2018. It’s still very early days as to where we’re headed. We know the direction of travel because 50 odd members have told us that they’re reporting against some form of SDGs in the next two or three years. That’s about a third of our insurance membership.

These are the top four at the moment, but that could easily change. I think it’s important to recognize that nearly all of the SDGs are utilized by our members depending on their business model and their affinity they’re particularly serving. Hence why we started into doing SDG benchmark, which I will lend over nicely to Liam.

Liam Carter:

I think this is always the part of the presentation where everybody wakes up.

Shaun Tarbuck:

That’s not fair. Hopefully, some of you can sleep. Sorry.

Liam Carter:

I’m kidding. But it is something that we know is a super-hot topic for all of our members. I think SDG calculator gets everybody’s ears prickling because it is something that’s been on the agenda for a while. It’s been something that people have been wanting to really be able to report back on. And again, something that could give an indicator, an aggregate for the entire industry.

A little bit about this project. And I think our Swiss Re colleagues are online. This is a massive shoutout to the partnership we have with the Swiss Re Institute team. We’ve created our working group around this and our members, should I say. We have given countless hours putting the data forward. But we’ve created an SDG working group off the back of the initial SDG calculator creation that’s happening.

Their mission here is really just to give mutual insurance industry expertise into each one of the SDGs and their indicators to make a true representation of something that we can use, that we can all use, to measure ourselves and to measure our industry efforts by. And ultimately, get better.

A little bit more detail around that it’s really looking around creating transparency, which is what you’re starting with, around all of these different indicators and what they mean for our different businesses. And breaking down into that level of detail that gives us some rigor. The aspiration is to create something that the world can use. The world’s insurance industry can use to keep us all honest, and to keep us traveling in the right direction around being all in it together. I think that’s the best way to put.

Efforts it’s to date. And I think this is an important thing to note around the success of this project thus far. We were three member companies representing various parts of the globe who have given enormous amount of time to creating the indicators to where we are today. We currently have 17 members who are engaged in the working group. There are monthly meetings with ad hoc sessions. Going through the details, submitting all their questions. And getting to the slight permutations of the different indicators to give it that rigor.

We’ve also subsequently jumped into the side with our microinsurance indicator, working with the ICMIF development team and the foundation and our different micro insurance providers that we have in the membership, to create an SDG calculator that best represents the work that micro insurers do from an SDG perspective. And we are ultimately looking at a way how we can integrate that with the broader spectrum to give our members easy access to helping those in need. Again, just to reiterate here, the idea is to create the industry standard that we can take to the rest of the world.

Shaun Tarbuck:

Just can I interject there? I just thought I’ll explain. There is also another group called the World Benchmarking Alliance. And the World Benchmarking Alliance, we are a member of that as ICMIF, on your behalf. They are looking at setting SDG benchmarks for every different industry in the world. It’s extremely well-funded by I think, five different countries, governments, and by Aviva. And so, this will form the platform we believe of how different industries measure their success in terms of benchmarks against the SDGs.

As we all know, what gets measured, gets done. There’s going to be a big drive for the private sector, which is us, to actually engage with our SDG benchmark into the World Benchmarking Alliance, which we have that open line discussion with them. They’re waiting for us to finish this. And then we can align that as the industry solution for the SDG measurements.

I think, it is important already, but it’s going to become even more important and globally. That’s just to make sure that we know what we’re creating isn’t just for the mutual sector, but it is for the wider sector. But clearly, we’re having the influence to set the framework early on.

Liam Carter:

Perfect. This ties nicely into our convention activities. I think we’ve given a couple of webinars on this and there’s been a couple of articles. I think many of you may be quite familiar with it, but it’s worth with the rundown.

We entered into an agreement with the UNDRR and this is the story of that partnership and the fruits of the labor, so to speak. At the end of April, a report was launched, a really fantastic indepth report around what the mutual insurance sector can do around DRR. We then moved onto creating a knowledge base of best practice.

And not only we made this accessible not only to our members, to the rest of the world, which we are constantly building on. And then, the third deliverable for this partnership was around creating this benchmark of best practice and something that we can benchmark ourselves. In a similar vein to the SDGs, that really with prevention focus.

Just to go into a little bit more detail, the reports, which is downloadable from the website and available to share with anybody, really looks at 20 case studies from the membership. And the different measures that they have in risk, reduction and prevention. From that the seven mechanisms were created. I’m not going to go through the seven mechanisms in detail, but the idea behind them is direct and indirect mechanisms that you can, as insurers can manipulate to help reduce disaster at risks.

The direct ones, really simple examples around pricing, prerequisites before cover and investment. These are things that you can actively do to influence these practices. And then indirect ones around raising awareness, partnerships with various stakeholders, sharing your information and data around risk and risk modeling to create a better risk reduction for communities and other people. Very highly level. There is a load of content on the knowledge hub and a load of content available to our members on any of this. And I’m happy to talk through.

This was the report. We next took all our stories that we had, and this is a growing database of stories. And again, a call to you, any of our members, if there are things that you would like to share, please reach out to me. But we’ve got 50 cases from 24 members and it’s growing. And showing our reach. And each one has a unique aspect around our prevention in DRR. And each one would be able to offer a level of learning.

We took all of these, created our prevention hub. Which again, just to mention, is available to everybody, not only ICMIF members. And a piece of work that we are very proud of and something that is meant to grow. What we did there is taken these basis of stories and we have started to work with our members to create a benchmark. This benchmark, this is a really high level example, but what we’re aiming to do is really break down each mechanism and score points for the efforts that our members are doing in each one of these mechanism areas. That will split out a score.

First I think initially, we had, I should say big aspirations around creating a benchmark for the industry, but it’s actually become really apparent that we are creating a benchmark for ourselves first for each one of our members. And then, we help them better themselves for next year. Eventually, we all have this as an industry representation. And hopefully, as the SDG calculator, a world representation of prevention efforts. And a great place for people to share and learn and better the work that they’re doing.

I think it’s really important to note that we have eight members that are highly engaged, that are giving of their time and expertise. We meet monthly, with ad hoc sessions where needed. And we are hoping to launch this at the conference with an actual tool that everybody can take to measure and benchmark their prevention methods.

And yeah, just to add into that, the benchmark we are creating, we do have, will flow into a global benchmark for the industry. And there is a mechanism through which we can do that. And that’s the Insurance Development Forum, which we are represented on by with three board seats. But when we brought this up, and Rob Wesley brought this up a year or so ago, there wasn’t much appetite for it.

It is starting to come through now, particularly with the change of chairman on the IDF, being Michel Liès from Zurich Insurance. He does have a particular interest in prevention. We know there’s a prevention working group, which we can filter. The work we are doing through the UNDRR because the co-chairs are Michel Liès and Mami Mizutori, who is head of the UNDR. Who knows what we’re doing in this particular area.

Shaun Tarbuck:

I think that is our mechanism to take this into the bigger insurance market and also recognition of the work that we’ve been doing with the UNDRR was seen last month when we had five presentations at the UNDRR global conference, which is every two years, that has about 7,000 people. To get five presentations of which three of those are high level ones with ministers around the world, I think is recognition. But this is going places. And we are leading the way in this particular area. Good. Okay.

Social, this is the area that a lot of our members are excelling in. I’m not going to go into what our members are doing, because you will know all of the areas within your communities that you engage in. And that some of the case studies you’re finding all on our knowledge on the database there. There is fantastic wealth of information out there.

But when I listen to other insurance conferences, like when was it, the IDF. Now you were at the UNEP PSI last week as well. It comes through loud and clear from the rest of the industry that socially is something that they’re not quite comfortable with yet. They’re not quite there. We are going to be doing a recent piece of research report, which we hope will be out by the end of the year, that looks at all of the different areas that our members work. A lot of case studies, which we will research and put into reports.

There will be another, I know a report out by the Geneva Association which will highlight probably the areas in which there needs to be a lot more work in the social part. But just for this purpose, because we’re talking about what do we do within ICMIF, we are working through the ICMIF Foundation on the 5-5-5, which is five countries, five members in five years to reach effectively 25 million people.

Now, we launched this in… Well, launched it at COP21, but by the time we started, it was 2016. We’ve actually come to the end of our first five years. No, we didn’t get to 25 million new people impacted. And that’s 5 million policyholders. But we did get to 14.4 million, which as scale goes from two projects, not five, that is absolutely brilliant.

There is no one else out there in the world that has got to scale in an impact in the way in which we’ve managed to get to through RIMANSI and the DHAN Foundation. And that has definitely raised our profile with the UNDP, who are now looking at helping us with challenger awards. It’s helping us with the UNDRR work that we’re doing, disaster risk reduction side.

InsuResilience, a global partnership there is the German government’s mechanism for funding inclusive insurance projects. They’ve now funded two of our projects, which is great. I was chair of the Insurance Development Forum, Inclusive Insurance Group to start with for the first three years. That continues to go strength to strength. These projects are well known. Sida is the Swedish development agency for mutuals and cooperatives and they sit on the foundation board now. They’re impressed. The Canadian government is looking at potential investments as well.

The work we’re doing in the inclusive insurance area, which if you went back to 1963, that’s when ICMIF started doing a lot of the work in setting up new mutual insurers. It’s now in a very different phase. It’s in a very phase where we can scale up and grow in emerging countries with projects that are delivered in country for the benefits of those countries. And I think that’s the big difference.

Certainly with the UN, is seeing that it’s not a global player doing it. It is a national player that’s being assisted by the wider ICMIF network. And I think there’s about 30, 35 members now that have engaged in one form, whether it’s financial assistance or technical assistance, into the 5-5-5. That is just one example, as I said. And it’s the one that we can impact on.

Rolling up into the conclusions, and by all means, if you have any questions, please do reach out to us at this stage. We all I believe have a role to play. And it’s great to see that ICMIF members are leading the way. As we said, leading the way of prevention in the SDG engagement side. Leading the way of inclusive insurance. We’re leading the way in many of the investment areas as well.

Liam Carter:

We have a question by the way. Have many members signed up to the principles for responsible investing?

Shaun Tarbuck:

That’s a good question. Now, I was going to put that slide in, but there’s, I think it’s about 20 now that have signed up. Six months, seven months ago, it was about 11. That is a good thing. The principles for sustainable insurance, which is more leaning towards the underwriting side, again, that has gone from about two to about eight, I think now. It’s asking a big increase.

And a lot of members do ask me, “Is it worth signing up to these?” And I say, “Well, it shows a level of commitment. It’s good.” There is a cost associated in. The UN bodies, both of them do charge about $20,000 to join. The commitments for the PRI and the PSI are not particularly high, but both of them have a second tier of leading players where your commitment is much higher.

For the PRI, it’s the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance. For the PSI, it’s the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance. You can sign up to get started. That’s fine. But then when you want to take it to the next level of commitment, you can join those much smaller groups, which are really trying to lead by example. And these are across the industry.

I’d have to look at the report again, but I think there are about five members that have signed the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance. And there are, I think for the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, there are about seven or eight. We do have that data and I can certainly maybe all add it to the end of the slides here. But it is a good way of doing it. But also, I would say an excellent way of learning how to get involved and engaged is through the working groups that ICMIF has. Because you will learn probably quicker by looking at the case studies, the examples of someone leading members and what they’re doing. But also, they’re all linked into the UN bodies that are leading the way as well.

I think there’s three different ways, the PSI, the PRI and the ICMIF network. And there’s lots of stuff to research on the ICMIF knowledge hub around what members are doing and continue to do to lead in this particular area. It’s not the only way, but it’s a good way to get there. But as I say, there is a cost associated and a certain expectation of a report back there as well. But I do think we’re, as the ICMIF are leading in many of these areas. I think it’s good to look what our members are doing and share in the peer group.

The ones that we’ve mentioned, that Liam’s mentioned about the SDG and the prevention benchmark. Once they’re launched in the conference in October, we’re hoping that next year that many members will sign up to the benchmarks and put their data in, so we can then do a collective report back as to how well ICMIF is actually doing.

We already have the sustainable investment report that we report back each year. This will be two other areas that we can do. 2023 for us. 2022 has been developing the benchmarks to measure and have as much member engagement to get to that position. 2023 is about spreading the message and getting more and more people engaged. And I think that’s the power of this particular network so that we can continue to drive the industry forward. That answers that question.

Liam Carter:

We’ve got another one saying, “No two fund managers need to have the same basis for measuring climate change in investment portfolios. Can equipped members develop a common approach and, or seek common standards from asset owners?”

Shaun Tarbuck:

I would say, yes, we can. But I would say at the moment, the Asset Owner Alliance is doing exactly that and Foxsam’s at the center of that. Because they’re one of the founding members of that from 2019. I think there’s a piece of work that we can do because the Asset Owner Alliance is mostly focused on carbon, which is SDG 13 effectively. They need to get that definition nailed down, which is they’re struggling with. And they’re using the PCAF, which I can’t remember what it stands for. But it’s the mechanism by which everyone’s trying to measure carbon. I think that’s important.

But I think the journey that we’re on, I think we will gain as much by sharing that through the ICMIF network when we do it. And you’re right. Fund managers do have a different perspective with what’s going on with the war between Russia and the Ukraine, that is driving up the price and the value of fossil fuel investments. Which at the same time, we’ve seen the slippage Johnson of the sustainability ones, but this is short term.

The gains that sustainability investments have made over the last 10, 15 years have been outstanding compared to any other benchmark. We’ve had a little bit of a setback where some people are starting to question, should we have the sustainable investments and is there value in there? Well, there is long term because long term, if you’re not investing for sustainability, there won’t be a fund there for us to invest in.

This stranded asset that we’re starting there about, the oil companies is off the table at the moment, but it certainly will be back because we’re looking at running out of fossil fuels by 2040 I think, or 2050. I do think we’re also, for those that are looking a little bit longer term beyond the current crisis that we’re in. I do think we’re going to start to see a lot more renewable energy coming through now because we can’t commit to the by the way we bought on the fossil fuels. We’re going to have to start to even more quickly ramp up the investment in renewable energy so that we’re not so reliant on certain autocratic states for our oil and our gas.

I do think that renewable energy journey is really going to rocket in 2023, but I’m not a fund manager. I’m not going to give advice out on that, but it’s a great question. I think it is in the long run, playing into our hands.

Liam Carter:

Yeah. That’s it for questions.

Shaun Tarbuck:

Okay. Just to chug on with the conclusions, it is true that many ICMIF members are starting that journey. We see that week in, week out. And I think if the answer is to all of you that are starting it, reach out to well, reach out to your fellow members. The conference in Rome, a large part of it is going to be around sustainability and leading with purpose. And that’s a great chance to meet some wonderful leaders from around the world. We’re hoping to get around 400 people there because it is our 100 year anniversary.

Okay. Sorry for the sales pitch about coming. But I really do believe that is going to be the best way to learn from each other. We are doing all of these great things together and let’s carry on doing it. As you said, leading with purpose. That’s our conference title. But I think going forward, that will also be our key strategy as we move into the next four year strategy.

Liam Carter:

Thank you for joining us. Yeah. Reach out. Chat to you soon.

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