American International Group recently released its first Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report detailing the company’s strategic progress toward supporting a more sustainable future.
AIG’s ESG Report outlines how the company is aligning its sustainability efforts with its core business strategy and describes how AIG identifies, measures and manages environmental impact and risk, sets and lives by specific standards of corporate citizenship, and empowers its sustainability agenda.
The Report is the compilation of several years establishing and advancing various ESG efforts across AIG. It builds on AIG’s commitment to transparency as a public respondent to the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) for the last 11 years and one of the first US insurance companies to publish a Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) Report. The Report aligns with recognized guidelines such as the TCFD framework, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board Standards (SASB), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standard and UN Sustainable Development Goals.
In terms of AIG’s outlook on energy transition, the company’s ESG report states the following:
“Climate change is a complex issue and the world cannot currently meet its energy needs through purely green technologies. We believe in promoting preparedness through diverse energy portfolios around the world. This includes the disciplined underwriting of and investment in renewable, lower-carbon, as well as fossil fuel energy producers and users.
We do not feel it would be in the best interest of our stakeholders and the general public which expects reliable access to energy to abruptly reduce or stop insurance access to clients that are heavy users or producers of fossil fuels, or to cut all investments in companies that have not yet completed their sustainability transition.”
The report also explains the expansion of AIG’s capacity and capabilities in the renewable energy market and how that is used to provide risk solutions for clients as they reposition their asset portfolios. AIG is developing an energy transition project to bring together the company’s resources to service its energy clients in their transition to a low-carbon economy.
AIG states that it carefully assesses, selects, and prices the risks that it underwrites and investments that it makes. AIG’s Risk Appetite Framework establishes and maintains appropriate limits on the material risks identified for its core businesses.