Resilience and sustainability: the link

Making the world more resilient is Swiss Re’s vision. Sustainability as a strategic priority supports our ability to meet this vision. Here’s how:

Swiss Re’s vision is to make the world more resilient, thus enabling communities to quickly bounce back after a disaster. Through our Group Sustainability Strategy we help reduce risks that may weaken resilience and develop re/insurance solutions offering protection against them.

Resilience describes the ability of individuals, organisations, communities and entire societies to bounce back after major setbacks such as financial or human loss due to natural disasters, pandemics and other risks. Effective re/insurance protection plays a vital role in strengthening this ability.

Sustainability denotes the principle of achieving economic and social development that can be maintained in the long term, ie without overusing precious resources. Major challenges that undermine sustainable development, eg climate change, insecure food supplies, health funding gaps, ageing infrastructure etc. can weaken resilience because they create new risks or aggravate existing ones, further widening the protection gap.

Our focus on sustainability seeks to identify and address the challenges that threaten stable long-term development. From the perspective of a re/insurer this translates into offering protection against such risks where viable, supporting efforts to reduce them and to prevent them ("adaptation" and “mitigation”). This in turn helps strengthen resilience.

Finally, companies that make sustainability a priority across all aspects of their businesses are better qualified to adjust to the changing risk landscape – they become more sustainable themselves. In Swiss Re’s own case, this enhances our long-term prospects of continuing to meet our vision of making the world more resilient.