Target 13.1: Resilience and adaptive capacity to climate hazards
Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Resilience and adaptive capacity are built by governments and households, but the capital, pricing signals, and physical assets that make adaptation happen are largely corporate. Property and casualty insurers decide what risk is insurable and at what price. A Center for American Progress analysis of the insurer retreat from high-risk US markets reports that 1 in 13 American homeowners is uninsured, leaving at least $1.6 trillion in unprotected market value. The same analysis reports that premiums in the areas most affected by disasters rose 14.7 percent faster than inflation from 2018 to 2022. Utilities, railroads, ports, telecoms and real estate owners hold the infrastructure that must be hardened. Banks decide what resilience investment gets financed. If publicly traded companies in these sectors treated resilience as a core obligation to their owners, underwriting would reward property-level mitigation. Capital would flow to hardening, and the adaptive capacity of whole regions would rise. Governments must still plan and build public works, so owners supply a necessary input rather than the whole answer.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Files proposals asking insurers to measure and disclose emissions from underwriting and asking banks to publish climate transition plans for their financing.
Co-filed the Chubb underwriting emissions proposal and led an earlier series of climate filings at Travelers, The Hartford and Chubb.
Announced and coordinated member filings at the six largest US banks asking them to align financing and climate transition plans with their 2030 targets.
1 campaign on record
Measure and disclose greenhouse gas emissions from underwriting, insuring and investment activities in high-carbon companies.
With Green Century Capital Management
Result: 28.3 percent shareholder support. The filers noted annual insured losses from US natural catastrophes now routinely approach 100 billion dollars, against 4.6 billion dollars in 2000.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.