Finance & Investment

Your Insurance Policy Is a Climate Strategy. Most Companies Don’t Know It.

Most companies can tell you their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Far fewer can tell you whether their insurance program strengthens or undermines their climate strategy — or whether they will have stable coverage five years from now.

Sponsored Content | By Damien Williamson and Premiums for the Planet | Published 2 weeks ago | About a 5 minute read

A Powerful Tool for Climate Inflence

While hosting a recent Premiums for the Planet webinar titled, “Unlocking Insurance as a Hidden Climate Lever,” Patrick Flynn posed a question that rarely surfaces in boardrooms: What if one of the most powerful tools for climate influence is sitting inside your annual insurance renewal? Flynn, former Head of Global Sustainability at Salesforce and now Founder of Switchboard, a firm dedicated to helping companies make the strategic connections that accelerate climate action, argues that insurance is one of the most consequential financial systems shaping markets.

“Insurance, banking, and retirement accounts are seen as climate-neutral decisions within a company,” Flynn explained. “When in fact they’re big levers for change.”

In climate-exposed regions and industries, premiums are rising, deductibles are expanding, and coverage is shrinking. For many companies, the renewal conversation has shifted from routine procurement to strategic risk management.

Roughly $7 trillion in premiums flow through the global insurance system each year. More importantly, insurers decide what risks they are willing to underwrite — and at what price. Businesses struggling with rising premiums rarely ask whether their insurance dollars are reinforcing the very risks they are trying to hedge.

“If you can’t insure something, it doesn’t get built,” says Brad Stevenson, CEO of Premiums for the Planet. Premiums for the Planet (PFP) is the first B Corp–certified commercial insurance brokerage in the United States. The organization aggregates the insurance spend of mission-driven companies, negotiates with carriers on their behalf, and reinvests a portion of its commissions into climate and community impact programs.

Rather than treating insurance as a transactional renewal, PFP uses coordinated premium volume to influence underwriting practices and align coverage structures with long-term resilience. The model treats insurance purchasing as strategic market participation, not passive procurement. Stevenson describes insurance as “the apex driver of a market economy.” Underwriting decisions influence fossil fuel infrastructure, renewable energy projects, and climate adaptation investments. When insurers reprice or withdraw from risk, they send early signals about long-term exposure. And yet, most corporate climate strategies never touch it.

The Blind Spot Inside Sustainability Strategy

The separation between sustainability strategy and financial decision-making is rarely intentional. In many organizations, sustainability teams focus on emissions, supply chains, and operational performance. Insurance typically sits inside finance or risk management. The two rarely intersect during renewal.

Flynn has seen this first hand in his career. “Many companies have optimized their supply chain but fewer have thought to apply that same logic to their bank or their insurer. The largest financial institutions organize around their biggest clients and listen to their needs. If you're a significant account, you have more leverage than you're using.”

Insurance is not a traditional procurement relationship. It gets buried as an administrative cost of doing business and rarely appears on a carbon dashboard. That invisibility makes it easy to overlook, even inside companies with sophisticated climate programs. “The emissions at stake from insurance and banking are tremendously large,” Flynn says. “It’s a huge under-pulled lever for action.”

For sustainability leaders, that reframes the work. Climate strategy is not only operational. It is financial.

Finance Is Not Neutral

Lauren Dubé, Director of All Good Things at Climate First Bank, sees the same pattern in banking. “Over the past seven years, according to data from Topo Finance, the world's 60 biggest banks poured $5.5 trillion into oil and gas,” she notes.

To make that number tangible, Dubé once calculated what it would look like in real time. “If you gave someone a dollar every second,” she says, “it would take about 174,000 years to reach $5.5 trillion.”

That capital flow shapes the same systems corporate sustainability teams are trying to decarbonize. Insurance operates differently, but with similar consequences. Insurers price forward-looking risk. When climate volatility increases, premiums rise or coverage contracts, regardless of a company’s sustainability ambitions.

Individually, a company’s premium may have limited influence. Collectively, coordinated buyers can engage carriers on underwriting criteria, resilience incentives, and long-term partnership structures in ways isolated firms cannot.

“It doesn’t take that many of us coming together to be a really compelling market force,” Stevenson says. For leaders accustomed to coalition-based supply chain reform, such as RE100 or Fair Trade, the logic is familiar. The difference is that this lever sits inside finance.

The Executive Conversation That Needs to Happen

This is not simply about values alignment. Climate volatility is reshaping insurance markets, and in some regions and sectors, insurance access is becoming a strategic vulnerability.

Companies that reduce emissions, strengthen infrastructure, and invest in resilience should theoretically present lower long-term risk profiles. Yet sustainability performance rarely translates into materially improved insurance pricing or capacity. Companies investing in resilience are not consistently rewarded.

“They don’t have a champion right now that’s actually going to bat to say, ‘These organizations are better stewards. Why isn’t that factored into their insurance cost?’” Stevenson says.

For Flynn, this is where sustainability leaders must expand their scope. “If we’re serious about systems change,” he says, “we have to engage the systems that move capital.”

That means bringing sustainability into the renewal process, asking how underwriting criteria account for resilience, and exploring whether collective purchasing mechanisms can translate climate commitments into measurable insurance outcomes.

It begins with internal alignment. Who owns the company’s insurance relationship? Is sustainability part of the renewal conversation? Insurance is not back-office overhead. It is a condition of doing business. It is often among a company’s largest expenses and a prerequisite for financing, governance, and contracts. When coverage contracts, business models destabilize. At the same time, capital can continue flowing toward activities that amplify the very risks companies are trying to hedge.

Insurance determines what gets financed, what gets built, and what survives volatility. If it’s missing from your climate strategy, your strategy isn’t built for the economy ahead.