Airmic promises to practise what it preaches on ESG

ESG will be one the biggest issues facing risks managers for years to come, believes Airmic CEO Julia Graham, who stressed that her association is taking the issue seriously as it looks to boost diversity, focuses on COP26 and develops education. Graham said ESG represents a “great opportunity” for risk managers to make their mark. “There is absolutely no doubt that everything associated with ESG, whatever you focus on, is going to be a top technical issue for the foreseeable future,” she told Commercial Risk Europe. But she advised members daunted by the scale of ESG to focus on specific areas most pertinent to their business and risk appetite. “We are suggesting you can’t do everything. So you may need to focus on what matters the most. You have to keep your compliance at the back of your minds because of course reporting on these issues is a compliance issue. But if there are some things that are really top of your agenda, then pay the greatest attention to those. Whether that’s the result of the type of business you are in and how climate change might affect that, or whether it is more on the governance side of things, you just need to have that focus and deliver your approach,” she added. Graham said ESG is a big issue for Airmic and promised the association will “practise what it preaches” on the topic. She said Airmic is particularly focused on gender and age, as it tries to improve performance on diversity“That’s where a lot of the best statistical benchmarks exist, so we can track our progress and see how well we are doing. That doesn’t mean the other things aren’t important, but as we continue our journey it is really crucial that we know where we want to be and we know how we got there,” she said during Airmic’s conference. Not only is Graham the first female Airmic CEO, the latest board has an equal gender split. It is being chaired by Claire Combes. “We have an evenly balanced board, a great range of age but not so great on ethnic mix, however it is better than in the past. We work very hard to deliver evidence that we practise these things too,” said Graham. Airmic has also recently appointed an ESG ambassador in Glenn Ellis, who is a board member and leads the association’s ESG project group. Graham explained that he will be focusing on ESG efforts at board level and among the wider Airmic team. “Glenn is going to challenge us in everything that we do to ensure we are practicing what we preach,” she said. Airmic will be representing the risk community at the UN’s COP26 summit, hosted by the UK in Glasgow next month. “We have been invited to go to COP26 in Glasgow – one of the Airmic team will be there as a guest, learning and listening at that event and coming back to work out how that might influence our agenda for 2022,” said Graham. In addition, Airmic is trying to improve its education across ESG issues and, as far as possible, has aligned its annual conference in Brighton this week to that agenda. “You’ll find a lot less printing at the conference. We have consciously tried to ensure that everything we provide has got a thought behind it,” explained Graham. She conceded that the association has struggled to deliver diverse speakers at its event, in part because the insurance industry, in particular, is not a very diverse profession. “So I take quite a lot flak from Airmic members saying some of our panels and meetings are not as diverse as they would like. They are absolutely right… but we have worked very hard to try and make them as diverse as we can. We do look at diversity and set ourselves some very demanding targets,” said Graham.

Airmic promises to practise what it preaches on ESG

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