Our commitments

… to the United Nations

Many of the innovative insurance transactions we have completed in recent years cover losses from natural catastrophes and weather volatility (eg drought or excessive rainfall). As climate change is expected to increase these risks, such transactions also help communities increase their climate resilience.

Building on the experience we have gained with these solutions, we made a significant commitment at the UN Climate Summit held in September 2014 in New York City. Personally addressing the government leaders present at the summit, our Group CEO Michel M. Liès made the following pledge: “By the year 2020, Swiss Re commits to having advised 50 sovereigns and sub-sovereigns on climate risk resilience and to having offered them USD 10 billion against this risk.”

… to the Grow Africa Partnership

The African continent, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, is a focus area for our efforts to bring risk protection to underinsured communities. Most people in these countries are smallholder farmers and depend directly on agriculture for their livelihoods, yet have had little or no access to insurance protection so far. As a result, volatile weather and subsequent harvest failures can have devastating consequences for them.

To help find answers to this problem, we made an important commitment to the Grow Africa Partnership (www.growafrica.org) in 2012. This initiative was launched by a number of organisations to promote public-private collaboration and investment in African agriculture.

Our commitment to the Grow Africa Partnership includes the following three elements:

• Give farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa access to tools such as weather and yield index insurance products;
• Invest about USD 2 million per year in resources to support the development of sustainable agricultural risk management markets;
• Provide agricultural insurance for up to 1.4 million smallholder farmers.

To create effective insurance solutions, we work closely with several partners such as Oxfam America, the World Food Programme, USAID and the Global Index Insurance Facility. By the end of 2014, we helped to establish a total of 20 programmes that brought weather insurance to two million smallholder farmers in 12 Sub-Saharan countries – reaching our target ahead of schedule, and even exceeding it.