The Sustainable Finance Podcast: Climate-conscious companies challenge the insurance industry

Insurance carriers are the second largest money management group and one of the most impactful regulatory industries on earth. Brad Stevenson, founder and CEO of Premiums for the Planet, joined me to talk about how this membership-based collective action movement is motivating the insurance industry to incorporate more sustainable investment strategies.

Paul Ellis: Brad, can you tell us about your “Aha!” moment?

Brad Stevenson: Literally, the amount of money that insurance carriers received in premiums, if it was measured by GDP, it would be the third largest country on the planet behind the U.S. and China. But that doesn’t even compare in my mind to the other discovery or awareness that I had in that moment—that insurance carriers are deciding what they will or won’t underwrite, what they will or won’t insure, and how they insure those things. And so if you can’t get insured, you can’t get funded. If you can’t get funded, you can’t scale.

And as simple as that, the insurance industry has the power, the regulatory force and power of government moving at the speed of business. In my estimation, there’s not a more impactful potential industry that we could get on our side for the climate fight.

PE: From a financial perspective, how does Premiums for the Planet act within the current insurance ecosystem to drive positive environmental as well as social outcomes?

BS: We asked: How do we take something that everybody’s already doing and bring impact and brand value and mission alignment to it? We said, OK, on one side, we have the policy holder, all of us in our organizations that are buying insurance. On the other hand, we have the insurance carrier—that’s our desired change agent; we want to get them to shift the way they think about investing in underwriting.

And in the middle, you have the perfect matchmaker, which is the brokerage. And the brokerage in that landscape already exists to organize and aggregate insurance premium spend. So what we’ve essentially done is repurpose the brokerage platform alongside a climate action membership community called Premiums for the Planet, so that when organizations do what they already are doing, they continue to buy insurance.

And when they work through us to get it, they become a part of a climate action community where those dollars now have visible impact and drive towards system change.

Watch the full program: