Climate Risk Report scores businesses on their vulnerability to climate-related threats; Climate Reporting Aid supports ESG disclosures
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—Climate change poses a serious risk to businesses globally, but which of your facilities are at highest risk, and in what ways? And how can you best protect your business today and ensure you prosper in the future?
FM Global today answered these questions for policyholders by introducing two new first-of-their-kind climate resilience products: the FM Global Climate Risk Report and the FM Global Climate Reporting Aid. Both are available to FM Global clients, which include many of the world’s largest organisations, including one of every four Fortune 500 companies.
Climate-related losses at commercial properties with the highest climate risk are 30 times more likely to occur and be 180 times more severe than at properties with the lowest climate resilience, according to FM Global research.
“We’ve analysed losses from climate risk and the value of climate resilience,” said Randall E. Hodge, executive vice president, staff insurance operations, at FM Global. “These new climate resilience products provide our clients with informed guidance from which they can prioritise their climate-risk-mitigation investments, ultimately leading to a more resilient tomorrow.”
Risk prioritisation
The Climate Risk Report scores each client organisation based on the actions they have taken to address climate risk and their unique exposure to events like flood, windstorms, hail and wildfire. A client’s score is based on both actionable risks—those that can be mitigated by actions like installing flood barriers—and inherent risks, such as exposure to extreme weather. This information helps CEOs, CFOs, chief sustainability officers, risk managers and other business leaders prioritise their most critical investments in climate resilience.
The Climate Risk Report is based on billions of property-risk data points FM Global has collected in more than 60,000 engineering visits each year to client sites. The report is also underpinned by artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to help clients prioritise their risk improvement efforts.
The Climate Risk Report complements FM Global’s recently announced Resilience Credit, a 5% premium offset to FM Global policyholders. Those companies can invest the credit—which totals approximately US$300 million across FM Global’s client base—in priorities identified in their Climate Risk Report. It has the potential to help those organisations reduce total loss expectancies from those exposures by more than US$120 billion.
Help with ESG reporting
The second new product, the Climate Reporting Aid, is a guide that helps clients disclose acute and chronic climate-related financial risks to investors and the public, according to widely-adopted frameworks like the international Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), consisting of representatives from across the G20. “We are learning from our clients, and in particular from their chief sustainability officers, that this data is very valuable in completing these financial disclosures, and that data can be difficult and costly to obtain otherwise,” said Hodge.
Climate risk disclosure is an integral component of reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, a pressing responsibility for global organisations. Data from a custom Climate Risk Report can support reporting on climate-related opportunities and planned actions toward greater climate resilience.
The Climate Risk Report and Climate Reporting Aid also will be provided to policyholders of AFM, FM Global’s middle-market business unit.
A set of climate resilience products
These new products bolster a climate portfolio that includes the publicly available FM Global Resilience Index. The online index ranks the relative resilience of the business environments of nearly 130 countries and territories and includes interactive climate risk and ESG filters. Coming soon is a predictive Climate Change Impact Report that will provide insights on clients’ unique chronic risk based on the evolving impact of climate change on perils such as drought, extreme temperatures, increased precipitation, intensifying winds and rising sea levels.
About FM Global
Established nearly two centuries ago and present in Australia for almost half a century, FM Global is a mutual insurance company whose capital, scientific research capability and engineering expertise are solely dedicated to property risk management and the resilience of its policyholder-owners. These owners, who share the belief that the majority of property loss is preventable, represent many of the world’s largest organizations, including one of every four Fortune 500 companies. They work with FM Global to better understand the hazards that can impact their business continuity in order to make cost-effective risk management decisions, combining property loss prevention with insurance protection.