LONDON—As a group of nearly five hundred marched through Leadenhall Market in London’s financial district wearing wetsuits, goggles, flippers and life vests, a few voices in the crowd began to sing to the tune of a popular nursery rhyme.
“Row, row, row, for life, floods are rising high,” they sang quietly. “Urgently, urgently, urgently, urgently, act now or we’ll die.”
Activists leading the march carried a bright pink life raft with the words “Insure Our Survival” painted on the side, and posters with slogans like “Stop Climate Crimes, Stop Fossil Fuels” and “Floody Hell!”
The Oct. 28 march was the first in a week of demonstrations across the United Kingdom held by Extinction Rebellion UK, the direct action activist organization, pressuring insurance companies to stop underwriting new oil, gas and coal projects. The demonstrations used costumes, songs, performances and demonstrations to paint a picture of the crises likely to ensue as global heating intensifies: disastrous global floods followed by widespread food shortages and ensuing civil unrest exacerbated by population growth and insufficient resources.
The U.K.-based campaign comes eight months after a global week of action with the same goal led by the international coalition Insure Our Future. As a growing body of attribution science tracks the impact of human-induced climate change in spawning more frequent and severe climate disasters, activists see insurance—without which new fossil fuel projects can’t be built—as a critical lever on the financial viability of the oil, gas and coal industries.
“The weak spot of the fossil fuel industry is insurance,” said Extinction Rebellion activist Marijn van de Geer on the first day of protests in London. “If we can persuade as many insurers as possible to pull out of these projects, we have a real chance of actually stopping those projects, and that’s ultimately what the goal is.”
Targeting the “Weak Spot in the Fossil Fuel Death Star”
In a Star Wars themed recruitment video for the Insure Our Survival actions, British naturalist and nature photographer Chris Packham called the insurance industry the “weak spot in the fossil fuel Death Star,” and urged supporters of Extinction Rebellion—who commonly refer to themselves as “rebels”—to descend on the city of London to oppose the destructive forces of “oily darkness.”
“The global week of action [brought] a lot of attention on insurers and their role in the climate crisis,” Ariel Le Bourdonnec, an analyst for Reclaim Finance, a research organization focused on analyzing financial actors’ climate impacts, said of the spring protests. “You see groups actually launching new campaigns on insurers.”
Activists say it’s hypocritical that insurance companies publicize growing climate dangers and pull coverage from vulnerable zones while continuing to profit off the projects that are increasing the emissions driving global warming. Unlike banks and fossil fuel businesses, insurance companies’ financials are intrinsically linked to the real-world ramifications of continued fossil fuel development, said Extinction Rebellion UK activist Jamie Anderson.
“They’ve got more stake in taking the long-term view, but it doesn’t stop them taking the short-term view for profit,” Anderson said.
Insure Our Survival organizers said they were inspired by insurance company policy announcements that followed Insure Our Future’s global week of action.
In March, Probitas, a London-based insurer that’s part of the Lloyd’s of London syndicate, confirmed that it did not intend to insure the West Cumbria coal mine in the U.K. or the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, though it attributed those decisions to the company’s environmental, social and governance policy and said it was not influenced by the week of protests. A month later, the Zurich Insurance Group announced that it would not underwrite new oil and gas extraction and metallurgical coal projects.
Activists cite these decisions as evidence that protest tactics are effecting change.
“We have absolute evidence that the pressure worked,” said Steve Tooze, an activist with Extinction Rebellion in London. “We knew that this was having an impact. Within [the insurance company] buildings themselves, it was a topic of conversation.”
Although some companies have begun to limit their coverage of fossil fuel projects, activists still face an uphill battle to rein in the underwriting enabling fossil fuel development. In the meantime, the industry’s other customers are suffering as the global costs of climate-driven disasters accumulate, leading insurance companies to raise premiums or drop coverage in vulnerable zones.
Extinction Rebellion targeted major insurance and reinsurance companies including AIG, Allianz, Chubb, Hiscox, Marsh McLennan, Tokio Marine, QBE and the world’s leading insurance and reinsurance market, Lloyd’s of London. Two weeks before the actions, the group wrote letters to 59 insurers, saying that they would target the companies with disruptive protest, “reluctantly and with regret,” unless they received a “public declaration” that they would stop insuring all new fossil fuel projects.
According to Extinction Rebellion UK, QBE was the only company that responded to the activists’ demands. Days before the protests, the firm shared existing sustainability commitments, including those focused on achieving net zero emissions for its own operations by 2030, but making no new restrictions on the underwriting of fossil fuels.
“We replied that, unfortunately, this is a form of greenwash as it ignores the massive oil, gas and coal elephant in the room—the carbon emissions from their fossil fuel clients,” Tooze said.
“We’ve had no reply so far to our invitation to talk further about dropping these clients.”
QBE has a stated goal of a net-zero underwriting portfolio by 2050 and has some restrictions on fossil fuel underwriting, including no new coal and oil sands, but it continues to underwrite oil and gas activities such as exploration, drilling and refining.
“We see firsthand the impacts of a changing climate on our customers, communities and partners, and we support an orderly and inclusive transition to a net-zero emissions economy,” wrote Sandra Villanueva, head of media relations and content at QBE in London, in an emailed statement. “We recognise the importance of addressing climate change and incorporating climate-related risk and opportunities into our decision-making.”
Organizers said they were contacted by employees from several insurance companies who expressed guilt about their companies’ climate impact and committed to meeting with activists to discuss how to influence their workplaces to stop insuring fossil fuel projects.
“They’ve got more stake in taking the long-term view, but it doesn’t stop them taking the short-term view for profit.”
— Jamie Anderson, Extinction Rebellion UK activist
On the second day of protests, six activists were arrested for using water-soluble paint to write “Insure Our Survival” and the Extinction Rebellion logo on the windows of Willis Towers Watson. They also put up posters that said “stop insuring climate criminals” and referenced WTW’s own reports that climate change may exacerbate global unrest.
WTW is an insurance broker that has written extensively about the risks of climate change for the insurance industry, and provides risk management and insurance solutions to oil and gas producers.
“WTW was a pioneer among global brokers to invest in climate analytics,” said a statement emailed by Miles Russell, WTW’s global head of external communication. “Today, we are a leading advisor working with companies, financial institutions, governments and vulnerable communities to help them build their resilience to physical risks and transition to Net Zero. We have over 70 climate experts working in partnership with clients big and small and are proud of the work we are doing to address this critical risk together.”
Allianz declined to comment specifically on the week of action but said that it has “strict guidelines when it comes to underwriting or investing in fossil energies.” It pointed to policies that included restrictions on investments in coal-based infrastructure and certain oil and gas infrastructure. Among global insurers, Allianz has held Insure Our Future’s highest score for the last three years in the group’s assessments of overall policies restricting fossil fuel underwriting.
Lloyd’s of London declined a request for an interview or comment, and Chubb, Hiscox, Marsh McLennan, AIG and Tokio Marine did not respond to requests for comment.
London Activists Look Beyond the City
Although they varied widely in age, many Insure Our Survival attendees were senior citizens taking advantage of retirement to devote more time to activism.
Among them was 82-year-old Dennis Ayling, who has family in Florida and was wearing a bright yellow rain poncho on which he’d written, “Florida ’24, Debby, Helene, Milton.”
“Florida’s already been forgotten,” he said.
That day, Insure Our Survival activists focused on global flooding, which, intensified by climate change, has killed thousands of people across four continents just this year. During the week of the U.K. actions, catastrophic flash floods in eastern Spain killed at least 223 people. Insured losses from the floods are expected to add up to more than $3.8 billion, Bloomberg reported.
“My whole focus now is on the next generation,” said Ayling, who joined the Extinction Rebellion in 2019 after spending more than 30 years as a science teacher reading and talking about climate change. “I think we’ve badly shortchanged them, and we should be doing everything we possibly can.”
Many attendees at the march voiced frustration with the lack of public urgency on climate.
“We’re sitting here in the city of London, and the reality for people on the ground, it’s incredible to say it, but I think it’s still too far removed from them,” van de Geer said. “People are still sticking their heads in the sand, or maybe just think, ‘Well, it won’t affect me.’”
Although the U.K. is less immediately vulnerable to the worst impacts of climate change than other parts of the world, the country is already facing more common and longer heat waves, increased wildfires, more storms and flooding, coastal erosion and threats to domestic food production.
Extinction Rebellion, known for its creative and sometimes provocative demonstrations, tried to use art to make these seemingly abstract impacts more visceral. On the second day of action, activists wheeled the “world’s last potato,” a giant papier-mâché vegetable that they attempted to auction with a £1,000,000 starting bid, and offered baskets of carrots for £300 or leeks for £400, trying to illustrate how climate impacts on agriculture will raise grocery prices in the U.K.
Highlighting the role of U.K. insurance companies in enabling climate destruction outside of Great Britain, the London activists specifically demanded insurers publicly commit to not underwriting the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which stretches from Uganda to Tanzania and has received international condemnation for displacing local populations, human rights violations and deleterious environmental impacts.
Campaigns to stop the underwriting of EACOP, which has been called a carbon bomb, have had some success—29 companies have committed to not underwriting the project. But work on the pipeline is still underway and Lloyd’s of London has not ruled out insuring it.
Nicholas Omonuk, an activist from Uganda who traveled to the U.K. for the week of action, said it is crucial for activists in London to speak up about the project, given the repression that his fellow activists have faced in Uganda.
“We see how people are making corporations scared, and corporations are afraid of us and that’s why they oppress us,” Omonuk said.
At the end of the first day’s march, Omonuk—who is part of End Fossil Occupy Uganda, a youth-led group fighting for a just transition to renewable energy sources—addressed the rest of the marchers.
“For us, with climate change, it’s not just a weather issue,” Omonuk said, outlining the intersections of climate impacts on Uganda, where increasing floods, landslides, drought and fossil fuel development have driven displacement and food and economic insecurity. “It’s a social issue, it’s an economic issue, and that’s why we have to fight together.”
Omonuk asked British activists to recognize the disproportionate burdens that the U.K., as a seat of global financial power, has placed on the rest of the world.
“It’s your corporations that are affecting us,” Omonuk said. “It’s your banks that are funding these corporations; it’s your insurance companies that are funding these corporations; and these corporations make our own government stand against us and make us look like we are standing against the government.”
On the third day of protests, activists rallied outside of Marsh McLennan dressed as zombies in tattered clothes and painted faces waving satirical newspapers with headlines like “Floods or fire? Insurers cash in,” and handing out flyers calling on onlookers to “be a climate hero.” Marsh McLennan won a contract in 2022 to find insurers for EACOP, despite internal pressure from more than 100 employees who urged the company not to broker insurance for the pipeline, citing its “disastrous consequences” for the climate, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
“Marsh is absolutely complicit in the fossil fuel industry’s continuing destruction of our planet,” said Insure Our Survival activist and Olympic gold medal canoeist Etiene Stott, outside the company’s office. “And my understanding is that Marsh insurance [is] the broker of choice if you want to get a rotten, nasty, dirty, grotty fossil fuel project insured.”
Progress, Setbacks on Insurance Industry Climate Action
According to Insure Our Future’s October appraisal of leading insurance companies around the world, 46 insurers have committed to ending or restricting services for coal projects, 26 for oil sands and 19 for Arctic fossil fuel development. Eighteen have committed to some restrictions on oil and gas production.
Last month, the Italian insurer Generali announced that it will no longer insure risks associated with oil and gas expansion, including new liquified natural gas terminals, power plants and refineries. According to Reclaim Finance and Insure Our Future, it is the first insurer in the world to adopt an exclusion policy that affects the entire oil and gas value chain, although its policies toward midstream and downstream energy companies only apply to those found to be “transition laggards.”
Anti-fossil fuel campaigners have said that the policy signals positive momentum in the movement. In particular, the Generali policy’s inclusion of LNG projects with other fossil fuel assets is a significant development for the insurance industry, said Risalat Khan, a senior strategist with Insure Our Future U.S. But he added that it doesn’t go far enough, given that any expansion of fossil fuels is incompatible with the directive from scientists to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“For us, almost by definition, pretty much the entire oil and gas industry have proved themselves to be ‘transition laggards’ if you actually set the benchmarks based on science,” Khan said. “The insurance industry doesn’t take that perspective and they use various internal methodologies … and it usually falls short of aligning with a true 1.5-degree pathway.”
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Some campaigners said that overall climate progress from insurance companies has slowed in recent years, especially in the U.S., a trend that some have attributed in part to conservative backlash over environmental, social and governance investing and the “greenhushing” that’s come in response.
“The insurance industry tends to tout its expertise in extreme weather and risk management,” said Carly Fabian, a policy advocate at Public Citizen focused on climate change and insurance. “But so far, we’re not seeing that expertise translate to action when it comes to aligning their investments and underwriting with climate risks.”
Insurance companies are directly impacted by costly climate-related disasters. Last year in the U.K., weather-related home insurance claims hit a record high of more than $720 million, according to the Association of British Insurers. In the U.S., there have already been 24 distinct weather or climate disaster events in 2024 alone in which the losses exceeded $1 billion.
But instead of addressing these rising costs by reevaluating their role in enabling the root cause of climate change—excessive greenhouse gas emissions—insurance companies have sometimes chosen to focus on portfolio risk, raising premiums or pulling out of areas vulnerable to climate-driven disasters while continuing to profit from underwriting fossil fuel projects. With this model, some say that insurance companies stand to profit from climate disasters—at least in the short term.
Lloyd’s of London is the top global insurer of fossil fuel projects, according to Insure Our Future. It reported a nearly $1.3 billion increase in pre-tax profits in the first half of this year, compared to last year.
A Reclaim Finance report released in October found that of Lloyd’s 51 managing agents—which oversee and manage underwriting on behalf of syndicate companies—only 15 have committed to refraining from underwriting risks related to new coal mines and coal plants. Only five had committed to not underwriting new oil and gas fields. None had made commitments not to cover new LNG projects.
In collaboration with Public Citizen, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace Nordic, the report identified 25 fossil fuel deals supported by more than 20 managing agents at Lloyd’s between 2021 and 2024, including liability coverage for the largest coal mine in the world, for offshore oil and gas assets in the Arctic and for Freeport LNG in Texas, which has been found multiple times to violate the state’s air pollution laws.
“At this stage that we are on planet Earth, the way I see it is that there’s this global machine that is very short-term thinking, and the net result is omnicide,” Anderson, the Insure our Survival activist, lamented outside the Lloyd’s of London office.
As Catastrophe Costs Grow, Activists Target Regulators
“The insurance crisis is already draining and straining people’s budgets [and] public budgets,” Khan said. “If the insurance industry assumes that it can just keep increasing costs, who is going to pay for that?”
This year, Insure Our Future found through Freedom of Information Act requests that Chubb, after facing continuous pressure from activists for its underwriting of the Rio Grande LNG pipeline, is no longer insuring the project, although campaigners said that other insurers, including AIG, stepped in.
The swap “shows that you can’t really do whack-a-mole, and need regulation to really level the playing field so that those who are willing to make some rules on restricting fossil fuels aren’t just losing out competitively, with peers and competitors that are just picking up that business,” Khan said.
Climate campaigners cite some regulatory progress, particularly in Europe, where earlier this month the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) published a report recommending additional capital requirements for fossil fuel assets on European insurers’ balance sheets, based on the “high risks” of these assets. Insure Our Future campaigners said that move should signal to insurers that continuing to underwrite fossil fuel expansion is a “losing proposition.”
In the U.S., where the insurance industry faces little climate-related regulation, progress has been slower. But campaigners point to some state proposals that link underwriting of fossil fuel assets with climate risks.
In New York, a bill will be reintroduced in the coming legislative session that would prohibit insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects and direct them to phase out existing coverage, while also requiring greater transparency on premiums and coverage.
“New York state is a very profitable market,” Fabian said. “The insurance industry overall often has money left over at the end of the year, and that could be invested in communities to make them more resilient to climate change.”
Liberty Mutual, Allstate, State Farm and the New York Insurance Association, a trade group, did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the second Trump administration, many U.S. climate activists are looking for more state-level opportunities to lower emissions and increase climate resilience, and some campaigners see insurance as a promising avenue to drive such action.
“Change from one company can show what’s possible, but we also need more systemic change,” Fabian said. “The insurance industry won’t act on their own to meet the speed and scale at which the climate crisis is unfolding.”
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Keerti Gopal is a New York City-based reporter covering activism and grassroots mobilization in the climate movement. She is a National Geographic Explorer and has completed fellowships with Fulbright, the Solutions Journalism Network, and The Lever.
