The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of relevant sustainability risks and opportunities in the insurance industry, where we address the asset side, the liability side, and a broader corporate perspective. Furthermore, we discuss approaches on how insurers can deal with these sustainability risks and opportunities, and provide selected empirical insight from the literature and (industry) surveys on current practices mostly for the European market. Our study emphasizes that while climate change represents an important factor in this context, it is by far not the only one. Insurers should thus take a broader approach on managing sustainability risks and opportunities. Furthermore, key barriers include a lack of data and knowledge, which impede transparency between firms with respect to their sustainable management approach.

In this paper, we study the awareness of European and U.S. insurance companies of climate-related risks and opportunities using a respective indicator from the Refinitiv Eikon database that uses reporting data. Based on this, we examine the determinants and value of the awareness of business risks and opportunities resulting from climate change, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been done so far, despite its increasing and specific relevance for the insurance industry. We use a logistic regression analysis as well as a linear fixed effects model for a 10-year period from 2009 to 2018. Our results show that larger European insurers are significantly more likely to exhibit such awareness. When controlling for subsectors, property & casualty insurers tend to be aware of the risks and opportunities resulting from climate change. Moreover, when using the linear fixed effects model, we find a statistically significant positive value effect on Tobin’s Q.

This paper uses a text mining analysis to study the development of sustainable investing in the European and US insurance industry as reflected in their public reports from 2013 to 2018. The sample comprises 1215 annual, sustainability- and investment-related documents of 77 firms. We develop a dictionary with principles, criteria and terminologies as well as strategies, and differentiate between the quality of reports. Our results show that the number of firms referring to as well as the word count related to sustainable investing substantially increase over the sample period, and that insurers reporting about sustainable investing are on average significantly larger. We also find that European insurers report much more extensively on their sustainable investment practices as compared to US insurers in our sample. Most relevant in 2018 are references to general ESG criteria, followed by responsible investment and the Sustainable Development Goals. Top strategies mentioned were ESG integration and impact investing, whereby we observe that insurers evolve from mentioning one single towards multiple strategies over time. Finally, a regression analysis does not show a value-effect of sustainable investment-related keywords in reporting on Tobin’s Q, which may be due to the rather long-term investment perspective.