ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the past and future involvement of the insurance industry with the issue of climate change, and why some sections have been more active than others. The insurance industry has been largely uninvolved in the development of answers to climate change. US insurers remain sceptical on the issue of climate change. The UK insurance industry has been much more proactive on climate change than other nations. Insurance, on the other hand, is associated with extreme weather event losses, and adaptation to such impacts has been rather neglected because the consequences of climate change in that respect are uncertain and rather distant. The financial sector differs from industrial sectors on the issue of climate change in its reluctance to become involved in lobbying policy-makers. Many reinsurers attributed the unprecedented losses of the late 1980s and early 1990s to climate change.
