Media Coverage
Charles urges insurers to tackle climate change
14/09/2007 | Birmingham Post (Business)
The Prince of Wales yesterday launched an initiative to help the insurance industry tackle climate change.
Charles said insurance companies had an important role to play in encouraging the public to go green. The heir to the throne was speaking at the launch of the ClimateWise principles a set of environmentally friendly measures designed to promote more climate-friendly customer behavior.
He said: “I really don’t need to remind you that no one takes a longer term or more carefully calculated view of the future than the insurance sector. There can be few other sectors which are so directly affected at the end of the day by climate change.”
Over the past year leading members of the industry have been working together to come up with six key principles which they believe will promote action on climate change.
They include promoting pay as you go motoring policies and discounts for greener vehicles and offering homeowners advice on how to make their houses more eco friendly.
The group responsible for the initiative came together at the suggestion of the Prince to find ways of tackling global warming.
“I felt that if insurance companies could take a strategic view across all aspects of what they do and look at the problem as part of the whole business it might just make a difference” he told the Association of British Insurers climate change conference. He said he would now like to see the initiative taken on by other sectors of the business community and society.
“Until recently climate change was perceived as a problem for the next generation. Now scientists are saying the problem is so grave and so urgent that we have less than 10 years to slow, stop and reverse greenhouse gas emissions.
“I have said it before and I will say it again, we have to think of this as if we were ma wartime situation,” he said.
Charles said the human cost of climate change was brought home to him this summer as he stood with families in Yorkshire and Gloucestershire whose homes had been devastated by flooding.
“What we have witnessed in this country recently and in the United States two years ago is bad enough. But perhaps the great injustice of climate change is that it is poor people and poorer nations that are clearly going to suffer most from it and yet have contributed least to the problem,” he said.
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