Learnings from an industry leader: Swiss Re
On November 28, Climeworks hosted an online webinar to discuss the critical role of the insurance industry in scaling carbon removal. We welcomed one of the insurance industry's top experts, Swiss Re's Senior Sustainability Risk Manager Mischa Repmann, as our guest. Moderated by Robert Höglund, the conversation between Mischa and Climeworks' Corporate Partnerships Manager Laurent Müller provided a first-hand insight into how insurers can leverage their expertise to enter the nascent carbon removal market.
Key take-aways:
- Insurance companies can play three roles in parallel to scale carbon removal through de-risking, financing, and buying, as demonstrated by Swiss Re's pioneering 10-year agreement and strategic partnership with Climeworks.
- Through this collaboration, Swiss Re has gained access to a new asset class and risk pools, a high-quality carbon removal solution, and can build internal expertise, for example for their risk engineers.
- The due diligence that Swiss Re conducted underlined the credibility of Climeworks' solution and has inspired other insurers to take action.
- According to Mischa, their internal carbon tax has been the key tool to kick-start, and now steadily fund, Swiss Re's carbon removal engagement.