It's as easy as ESG
Striking the right balance

The UK is perhaps the most mature insofar as there have been mandatory requirements, particularly for climate-related financial disclosures, for a number of years, but this is now a requirement mirrored by the Canadian financial regulator. For our EU entities we are also having to navigate the new EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is both comprehensive and quite prescriptive in its approach. 

Whilst our approach to climate risk is arguably the most significant category of disclosure, companies are also expected to disclose increasing volumes of information around performance in relation to business ethics, corporate governance, human rights, and diversity and inclusion, for example. 

My role is partly about making sure that our messaging is aligned across the group business. There’s also much work to do around how we source and validate data so that the story we are telling is robust and we are painting an accurate picture of our performance. A longer-term area of focus is around how we can leverage our relationships with our corporate customers and supply chain and work with them to incorporate ESG practices into their operations so that we can achieve mutually beneficial goals.

When it comes to our retail customers, we are building on a history of fostering an approach to climate adaptation and resilience that is about customers and communities protecting themselves from the extremes of weather. This has been a particular feature of the Canadian environment in recent years. 

We want to make sure that people feel like they can make choices to help themselves to be more resilient should the worst happen, both at the level of the household and the wider community. Since 2010, Intact has committed over CAD$26 million in funding for climate adaptation action. A lot of that has been deployed in Canada, but we are now increasingly investing in partnerships in other markets like the UK, for example. 

The impact of climate change on our customers is clearly something that is a concern for the whole insurance industry, and we are pleased to support the work of industry associations like the Association of British Insurers, ClimateWise and the Insurance Bureau of Canada who are helping to foster an industry-wide approach. 
Fundamentals are the same 

Having worked on ESG in multiple sectors over 20 years, I’m always interested in how this plays out in different industry contexts. My observation is that the fundamental approach is actually always pretty similar, but there are clearly topics that you may emphasise or over-index depending on the sector and at a certain time and businesses are clearly not isolated from political context. 
 

When it comes to ESG as a business practice or discipline I tend not to get too hung up on the terminology. I really view it as an entry point into some really important conversations that we all need to have about the environment, with climate being a particular concern, about diversity and inclusion, about human rights, about equality and other issues. Those conversations don’t go away if you change the terminology around what people like me do for a living. 

Whilst those are all very different topics, my job is to try and weave that into a unified story about how a business thinks about itself and about its role in the world. I don’t think that will change “fundamentally”.