Earlier this year, global insurer Chubb launched its new global climate business unit to help combat the threat of climate change. The new unit is set to build out additional products, and offer additional services to help clients and the insurance industry.
In an interview with Reinsurance News, Matt McMullin, Chubb’s Global Climate Practice Leader & Energy Industry Practice Leader, North America, explained what measures that Chubb is putting in place within the recently launched unit to help tackle climate change.
“We’ve recently just crossed the 5% threshold for EVs in the US and there’s going to be a tremendous amount of infrastructure that’s needed to support that in terms of EV charging stations. So, one of our newer appetite and product initiatives is to provide meaningful capacity to the EV charging space, as that builds out over time. So, we are continuing to expand our offerings within a lot of these industries that are supporting decarbonisation,” he said.
“We are also continuing to expand our offerings within a lot of these industries that are supporting decarbonisation, carbon capture and sequestration. We began providing capacity there, and we’ve built out a robust underwriting strategy to help support that industry as it comes to scale. So we’re going to continue to see investment there, and we’re on the front end of that both from an underwriting and a risk engineering perspective.”
McMullin also stated that Chubb’s risk engineers have recently developed a climate plus resiliency tool, which involves the engineers taking a mixture of governmental data and proprietary models, which ultimately allows for them to be able to look at current state and future state impacts of climate change within Chubb’s insurance physical asset footprint.
Additionally, McMullin explained how the new global climate business is also helping Chubb work towards achieving its goal of working towards a net zero future.
He said: “I think a large part of this is that Chubb is going to be at the forefront of providing insurance solutions and risk engineering tools and solutions for evolving technologies, because the evolution of technology is going to be key towards a net zero economy.
“We have a team of risk engineers that are researching this every day and arming our underwriting staff so that we can develop our underwriting and appetite and expertise to help support this. Without that support it could be extremely difficult for them to find that protection.”
With both climate change and working towards a net zero future remaining hot topics within the industry, McMullin explained how Chubb is taking a global approach with its new climate business unit.
“We have a local presence in 54 countries and the ability to transact business in over 200. So we are working every other day almost to make sure that we’re aligned from a global perspective because frankly, a lot of the customers that we reach have a global presence.
“Currently we are working on building out the team which can ultimately lead to us building out new appetites, as well as new underwriting products and services that are specific to the climate tech industry.”
Elsewhere, McMullin also explained how the insurance industry is helping shape the transition to a lower carbon economy, as well as what other measures that insurance companies could begin adopting in order to achieve this goal.
“We are taking a fresh look at this entire approach. So, at Chubb we have extremely advanced technical risk engineers on our staff right now, and we’re also hiring additional risk engineers that are going to be dedicated to our new global climate practice, which is going to help shape our underwriting strategies and our ability to provide coverage and solutions for technologies that were not even around five years ago.”
He continued: “I think that’s an important way to look at it that it’s a little bit untraditional in terms of the historical data and the historical loss data that we are all used to seeing within the insurance industry.
“So, we are taking that very heavy risk engineering approach which is helping us to learn and understand the technologies, which is how we are going to be able to provide solutions for some of these new technologies, because they’re going to need that balance sheet protection to take it to that next step and bring these technologies to scale.”
