Demand for insurance can be driven by increased exposure. It can also be driven by increased awareness of existing exposure, and that is exactly what is happening in the environmental realm today, says Bill Pritchard, founder, CEO and president of
Beacon Hill Associates.
“I think overall we are really seeing an increase in awareness about obvious environmental exposures and also people’s responsibility for affecting the environment,” said Pritchard. “I think that has been a trend that’s been going on really for the past 15-20 years in our country.
“Today anyone who owns a facility or hires a contractor is aware that they can negatively affect the environment through contamination, and all of their neighbors are aware of it too,” Pritchard said. “So where you used to have a service station on your corner and everyone was happy to have easy gas, now they are also concerned about leaking underground tanks and what impact that is going to have on their drinking water. This awareness flows all the way through the economy, I think.”
Some things are trendy, but environmental awareness and responsibility seem to be on nothing but a growth curve.
Pritchard said that the US Environmental Protection Agency has taken big steps to make its work more transparent and that today anyone can go to the EPA’s website and find information on any business in their area that might have run afoul of the law.
“You can go online and see whether that light industrial manufacturing facility down the road has had any kinds of violation issues, any sort of environmental fines levied against them,” he said. “It is so much easier for the public to sort of police their neighborhoods and be aware of what is happening, and all of that flows back to the kind of insurance and the kinds of liabilities insureds need to be worried about.”
