One insurance company is using a novel method to educate staff about climate change.
“One of the things that I did this year was some Climate Fresk training,” said Jeanene Hill (pictured above). “Have you ever heard of that?”
Hill is head of coverholder and delegated authority Asia-Pacific for Canopius Group, the global specialty insurer. Insurance Business willingly admitted that it hadn’t heard of Climate Fresk training.
“We usually have six people per table and everybody’s given three cards and to start with you’ve got to put them in order,” she said. “There are little commentaries on the back that explain what the card represents and you go around the table and place the cards in the order that you think they come in.”
As a trainer, Hill is there to help guide staff as they play the game.
“You start drawing on butcher paper to talk about what would happen if, for example, the bees represented on one of the cards disappeared? What does that do to our food sources?” she said.
According to its website, Climate Fresk is a collaborative climate change workshop that uses an interactive card game to teach the science behind climate change.
The organisation is an NGO with thousands of volunteers that started in France in 2018. Its website says the group is now active in more than 40 countries. The workshops take three hours and involve a trainer with up to 20 participants.
“It’s really encouraging and it’s a very interactive way of getting people to understand climate change, rather than, ‘Go away and read all this information,’” said Hill. “You go from the beginning to where we are today and everybody has to think and guesstimate where they think and how they think climate change has happened and where it’s happened.”
She described the workshop as “an amazing exercise.”
“What we’re going to do at Canopius is actually implement that for new joiners because we take climate change very seriously here,” said Hill. “One of the issues is getting everyone to understand what it is? What the implications are? How it started and what can we do?”
In fact, Hill, who is also a director on the Underwriting Agencies Council (UAC) board, said she regards climate change as the biggest current insurance challenge.
“The way the world is moving and the frequency and severity of large cat losses has a huge impact on insurance companies at the moment,” she said.
Other industry challenges include the talent crunch and artificial intelligence (AI).
“We talk about talent and you can see that companies are bringing younger people through now but there was a stage there where developing and growing new talent was lacking,” said Hill.
When she calls AI a challenge, she means that in positive sense.
“I think the challenge is companies getting their heads around how to effectively use it to better run their businesses because I don’t think it’s going away,” said Hill. “As an industry we need to understand how we can utilize that better.”
One big issue that AI can help with, she suggested, is making data clean and usable.
“Everybody says they’ve collected data for a long time but how do we make it clean? And how do we make it usable?” said Hill.
During the last decade, Hill said the regulatory requirements placed on insurance companies have changed “substantially.”
“I think that’s a good thing,” she said.
Another good thing, said Hill, for doing business and the industry’s public reputation, is how insurance firms today are more focused on their clients.
“I think that’s a good thing because, ultimately, at the end of the day, we are here to pay their claims, they are our clients, and that’s who we should be focused on and who we should be servicing,” she said.
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