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Climate risk strategy for business
Strengthening businesses in the climate change era
With climate advisory and insurance specialists all under one roof, Howden is ready to support your strategy for climate change, end-to-end.
We’re fully equipped to help you:
- Predict, measure and adapt to the impacts of climate change
- Navigate the maze of climate regulation and compliance requirements
- Make sense of confusing, contradictory climate risk data
- Quantify climate risks and exposures
- Maximise the value of new opportunities
- Get complex projects off the ground
[The Howden team] provided technical insight into how climate risk can be better quantified compared to the way that we have historically thought about it
As the climate changes, so does insurance procurement. Be prepared.
As the effects of climate change increase and compound, purchasing insurance will become more complicated. It is highly likely that insurers will become much more selective as to which risks they take on.
Without a solid insurability strategy, your business may not be able to acquire the same insurance it has today. There may also be extra covenants in policies, with more stringent requirements on adaption measures and risk management efforts.
Insurability is the ability to secure affordable insurance for assets, investments, operations and projects. In the climate change era, maintaining insurability is fast becoming as important as maintaining a good credit rating.
To get affordable coverage, you’ll need to think like insurers think – and have the data to back it up.
Our team of climate practitioners and specialist insurance brokers are ready to support your insurability efforts. We’ll add value all the way from analysis and planning to insurance placement and claims advocacy.
Working together, we can build climate risk and insurability strategy into your decision-making models. By doing so, you can improve your negotiating position in the insurance markets, helping you achieve continuity of coverage.
Download our report, the Insurability Imperative, today.
Climate change is likely to affect your business in the following ways:
- New disclosure requirements
- Compliance and legal issues
- Challenges accessing finance and affordable insurance
- Weather incidents causing damage to property and business interruption
- Supply chain disruption
- Reputation management issues (e.g. greenwashing)
- New opportunities to explore and plan for
- Data overwhelm and analysis paralysis
- Complexity at insurance placement and renewal
What we will do for you
- Distil decision-useful outputs from a balanced range of data sources
- Address risk management issues that stop projects getting off the ground
- Improve your appeal to lenders and investors
- Help safeguard your business against rising costs
- Build in protection against negative PR and legal issues
- Uncover hidden opportunities
Howden's Climate Risk & Resilience team have played a critical role in defining the safeguards needed
Our services
We work with clients at all levels of climate strategy maturity. We'll add value at any stage of your journey.
Identify – initial investigations into the climate and nature impacts affecting your business.
Understand – deeper dives into specific areas of concern.
Take action – support with strategy design, including risk management and insurance.
Identify
Get a high-level view on how your operations will be affected by climate and nature issues. Find out where you stand relative to your peers.
Our services include:
Climate and nature risks and opportunities assessment
Assess your exposure to physical, transition and liability risks relevant to your assets, operations, and supply chains. We’ll provide risk scores and recommend mitigation strategies, aligned to leading frameworks such as TCFD, TNFD, ISSB, and CSRD.
Decarbonisation target setting
We'll help you build a clear emissions profile, identify cost-effective reduction opportunities, and set credible decarbonisation targets.
Disclosure advice and support
We’ll guide you through evolving disclosure requirements with tailored gap analyses, peer benchmarking and actionable roadmaps.
ESG materiality and benchmarking support
Prioritise the most material ESG issues through tailored assessments and peer benchmarking.
Horizon scanning for relevant litigation and regulation
Get sector-specific snapshots, jurisdictional summaries, and peer case overviews that clarify regulatory impacts and enable proactive risk management.
Understand
Take a deeper dive to cut through the overabundance of data and confusing, conflicting models. Analyse the detail of your exposures and model the implications.
Our services include:
Advanced scenario analysis for decision-making and stress testing
Using interactive workshops and enhanced quantitative analysis, we develop bespoke, decision-relevant scenarios and stress tests. Risk factors studied include climate variability, unmodelled risks and macroeconomic shifts.
Climate resilience advisory for real assets
Weigh up the costs and benefits of resilience investments across assets and portfolios. This includes financial impact analysis, cost-benefit assessments and insurability insights.
Existing strategy validation / expert opinion
We provide expert insights through ad hoc reviews, targeted research, and training. This helps you to validate strategies, fill internal knowledge gaps, and support innovation on emerging topics.
Green credentials review
Protect your business against greenwashing allegations and strengthen your public-facing sustainability messaging. We'll support you with regulatory gap analysis, peer benchmarking and tailored guidance.
Portfolio / supplier assessment framework
Get tailored frameworks to assess ESG, climate readiness, and disclosure maturity. This helps guide targeted support, monitor progress and reduce risk. Aligns to transition planning standards, e.g. ISSB, UK TPT, and GFANZ
Physical risk and natural catastrophe insurability review
Assess the financial impacts of climate and natural catastrophe risks. Get estimates of probable maximum loss (PML), identify top loss-driving assets, and evaluate resilience options.
Physical risks deep dive
Asset-level climate risk assessments to help you quantify financial impacts and make confident decisions.
Quantification of financial impacts
Translate climate-related physical, transition, and liability risks into financial metrics relevant to your business. Our process includes materiality assessments, stakeholder workshops, and insurance market trends analysis.
Take action
Get ahead with innovative solutions to insurance, risk management and financing challenges. Develop credible action plans, ready to win stakeholder and investor confidence.
Our services include:
Adaption / Transition planning
Turn your climate transition ambitions into credible, actionable plans aligned to leading standards. Identify gaps, build internal ownership, and win stakeholder confidence.
Capacity building and training
Targeted training and workshops for senior leadership and key stakeholders, building confidence and capability to integrate climate risks, opportunities, and resilience into operations.
Carbon and nature-related projects advisory
Screen carbon and nature-related project propositions for key risks, from market and political to environmental liability and IP. Includes mitigation recommendations and insurance advice to de-risk early-stage investments.
Climate and nature strategy development
We’ll help you develop viable climate, nature, and ESG strategies by benchmarking peers, aligning goals, reviewing existing measures, and providing actionable roadmaps.
Energy transition technology advisory
We advise on end-to-end on risk and insurance for energy transition projects. This includes financing, operations, climate and NatCat exposures, and carbon credit generation risks.
Insurance placement and claims advocacy
Specialist insurance brokers and dedicated claims advisors will support you with product design, bespoke wordings and negotiations with insurers.
Strategic insurability advisory
We bring together insurers and clients to form long-term strategic partnerships around climate and nature objectives. This collaborative approach supports alignment on resilience and transition strategies, and drives innovation in relevant insurance solutions.
About the Climate Risk and Resilience team
At Howden, climate practitioners and specialist insurance brokers work side by side.
We combine multi-disciplinary expertise across climate science, policymaking and financial services, all working together to help pinpoint exposures, and take decisive action to mitigate them.
We’re no ordinary climate risk experts – we bring a distinctive blend of experience, insight and insurance knowledge. Many of our people are pioneers in this emerging field. It’s no exaggeration to say: we wrote the books, did the deals and advised the investors that have defined the climate risk space over the past 15 years.
And we're still leading the way, with partnerships across the world, building the industry's ability to support the climate transition.
It's why we can confidently say, we offer a perspective like no other.
Working with Howden to launch this first-of-its kind insurance offer, we are now poised to unlock the potential of the carbon markets
Meet our specialists
Climate TransitionClimate TransitionTony has over 25 years global experience in strategy advisory, risk management, disclosure and programme delivery, with over 17 years as a leader and expert in climate change, environment and sustainability issues affecting businesses and financial institutions.
He joined Howden from the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) where he was Executive Director and Head of Transition Finance. He was responsible for delivering practitioner guidance on how financial institutions can achieve their Net Zero in their emissions reduction's targets. This included defining transition finance, transition planning and use of sectoral pathways and scenarios to work with counterparties on assessing and achieving their own emissions targets. He was also part of the delivery group for the UK’s gold standard on transition planning, and a reviewer of the World Energy Outlook 2022.
Prior to GFANZ, Tony was Senior Director at WTW in the Climate Resilience Hub responsible for working with clients on their transition risk and decarbonisation strategy, including the creation of the corporate accreditation of Paris accord alignment, Climate Transition Pathways.
Tony’s other experience includes 5 years as Global Technical Director at CDP (formerly known as Climate Disclosure Project), Director of Sustainability Consulting (EMEA and APAC) at Infosys, Consulting Director Sustainability and Head of Environment for Logica.
Tony also is on the Global Association of Risk Professional’s (GARP) Sustainability and Climate Risk Certification advisory committee, a fellow of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture (RSA).
Physical ClimatePhysical ClimateMarc Lehmann is Head of Physical Climate & Nat Cat Risk Advisory for Howden’s Climate Risk and Resilience team in London. His team provides a wide range of bespoke modelling and engineering services to help Howden clients assess and manage their global asset and operational risks, both for present day and also in the future to account for impacts due to longer term climate change.
Marc has over 20 years experience within the insurance and risk management sectors. He joined Howden from Jupiter Intelligence where he was Head of Business Development & Partnerships for UK/Europe providing physical climate data and analytical services to a wide range of international clients. Prior to this Marc held several senior level roles across the re/insurance markets including Head of Client Service Development at AIG and Global Head of Natural Catastrophe Risk Management services for corporate clients whilst at insurance broker Willis Towers Watson.
Marc has master’s degrees in structural engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ) and Imperial College, London.
Energy TransitionEnergy TransitionAndy is the Head of Energy Transition at Howden Group where he supports the various specialist teams across Howden to engage in strategic conversations with C suite executives about capital allocation, emerging risks and financing across the low carbon sector, understand the risks associated with emerging business models and new technologies and develop innovative insurance solutions to address these risks through mitigation or risk transfer to aid financing and drive capital flows.
Andy is a former senior partner and energy sector lead at KPMG where he served as a partner for 17 years. As a deal advisory partner for many years Andy’s clients were drawn from corporates, infrastructure funds, major Asian investors and private equity houses. In his last role he was Global Lead Partner for bp p.I.c. where he and his team supported the start of their journey to become an Integrated Energy Company.
Food Systems and BiodiversityFood Systems and BiodiversityDan Fairweather leads the Food Systems and Biodiversity within the Howden Climate Risk and Resilience Team. Dan has over 20 years’ experience in dealing with agricultural risks, mainly focussed on the aquaculture and livestock sectors. Starting out as a specialist Lloyd’s broker, Dan then went on to be the senior aquaculture underwriter at RSA for 7 years before retuning to broking, heading up the Livestock and Aquaculture Divisions at WTW and then Gallagher Speciality.
Latterly Dan has explored the use of parametric insurance and novel insurance products to incentivise environmental stewardship and support small-scale farmers and climate exposed communities. This work has led to a number of work streams with global environmental NGO’s to assess the role of finance and risk in the world of conservation.
Dan is increasingly looking at the regulation emerging around Nature and Biodiversity and exploring what can be done in the field of Biodiversity Credits and Biodiversity Net Gain and how risk management and insurance can support this. This work looks to learn from, and build on, the carbon credit market initiatives and emerging regulation.
Dan is a trained fish biologist, and is also currently a trustee for The Shark Trust, a global charity for the conservation of sharks, skates and rays.
Americas Lead & AgricultureAmericas Lead & AgriculturePaula joined Howden Group’s Climate Risk and Resilience team in July 2023, based in NYC.
Before, she led the WTW’s Climate and Resilience Hub Americas Practice, working towards societal climate resilience by creating solutions to large scale and multi-faceted challenges with corporate and public sector stakeholders across physical, transition and climate liability risks via strategic advisory and innovative risk finance and risk transfer mechanisms. Prior to WTW, Paula served as Sr. Microinsurance Specialist at Swiss Re, where she worked on the creation and operationalization of the Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organization (MiCRO) and led multiple implementations of innovative insurance solutions in public-partnership settings.
Paula also serves as Advisor to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator through her appointment at the National Advisory Council. Until August 2023, Paula served as Director of the Global Board of ARISE, United Nation’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).
Paula is a global expert on climate and natural disaster risk management solutions for the private, sovereigns, sub-sovereigns, and the international development sectors. She has a proven record spearheading global financial inclusion and humanitarian initiatives and conceiving of and executing strategic international business.
She is a multi-cultural professional and has worked in projects across the Americas, in Africa and in Asia. Paula holds a postgraduate Degree in Finance and a Graduate Degree of Economics.
Insurance MarketsInsurance Markets10 years industry experience with Hiscox and ACII qualified. Experienced commercial underwriter and underwriting manager, most recently Head of Underwriting Insight at Hiscox (right hand person to Global CUO).
Academic background in sustainability with a degree in Environmental Geography and laterally CISL Business Sustainability Management certification and pioneered sustainable underwriting strategy at Hiscox.
Joined Howden Markets to lead the Climate Risk & Resilience Markets team. Responsible for working with insurers to develop insurance capabilities to de-risk the future and protect our clients, through market engagement, strategic partnerships and consulting.
Passionate about sustainability engagement and education, as well as supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to become more sustainable.
MicroinsuranceMicroinsuranceCarlos is a Swiss-Colombian-US citizen, who holds a degree in Economics from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
In 1989, Carlos joined Swiss Re in Zurich starting a career that included P&L responsibility for Andean countries in LatAm, Office Head in Colombia and Mexico, before moving to Armonk, NY, as Commercial Director for Latin America. In 2011, he was ap-pointed Head of the Miami office, a start-up of Swiss Re in that city with focus on Latin America.
As of September 1st, 2014, Carlos was appointed CEO of MiCRO. Under his leadership, MiCRO has become a pioneer in the region in introducing index-based microinsurance that helps vulnerable and underserved populations recover more quickly from losses caused by natural disasters.
With Howden’s acquisition of MiCRO in May 2024, Carlos will lead MiCRO to “the next level”, one that sees inclusive insurance get the necessary traction to make significant contributions to sustainably closing the protection gap where most urgently needed.
Client SolutionsClient SolutionsKim leads Howden’s Climate Risk and Resilience Client Solutions Team and is responsible for bringing together the solutions and services that best meet the needs of our clients. Kim was previously at WTW’s Climate and Resilience Hub where, as part of the Financial Services Business Development Team, she led on product development, outreach and advisory to the asset management, retirement and life insurance businesses.
Prior to this, she spent over 11 years in Investment Management and was the International COO for the multi-asset investments group at J.P Morgan Asset Management where she led the team’s sustainability agenda including ESG integration, the uplift of existing and development of new sustainable products, and the implementation of sustainability-related regulations and initiatives including SFDR, MiFID sustainability preferences, EU Taxonomy, SDR and TCFD..
Chief Commercial Officer, CRRChief Commercial Officer, CRRSince joining Howden in 2013, Isabelle has held a number of roles. Most notably, building the Howden One network, which extended the Group’s global reach to 100+ territories. In 2022 Isabelle was appointed Chief of Staff and Head of Planning for the Howden Broking Division. During that period, Isa focused on aligning and organising strategic priorities with other members of the senior leadership team.
In October 2023 Isa joined the Climate Risk & Resilience team as Chief Commercial Officer, to promote our CRR team and embed its proposition across Howden internationally.
Prior to joining Howden, Isabelle has held a number of positions at KPMG (9 years, Paris, London and NYC) and Marsh Mclennan (6 years) where she was first appointed as Financial Controller for EMEA and then C.O.O for the UK Affinity Division. Subsequently she spent 3 years at an Insurance provider start-up (Asurion Europe) as Launch Director responsible for the full implementation of business solutions including IT.
Isabelle is both a French and British national, originally from the island of Martinique in the French Caribbean.
Senior AdvisorRowan Douglas
LinkedInSenior AdvisorRowan Douglas is a pioneer in the field of climate risk, disaster risk and re/insurance with over 35 years of international experience. Rowan is a Senior Advisor to Howden Group, supporting selected projects, events and client engagements using his 30+ years of industry experience and extensive networks across public, private and academic sectors in risk, insurance and sustainable growth. Prior to this Rowan was CEO of Howden Group’s Climate Risk & Resilience practice.
Before Howden he was CEO Climate and Resilience at Willis Towers Watson which housed the award-winning sovereign Disaster Risk Financing team that supported governments, regional risk pools and international institutions worldwide. Previously he served on the board of Willis Re as CEO of Global Analytics and founded the Willis Research Network in 2006 which was the largest collaboration between public science and the private finance sector.
Rowan founded and Chaired the Operating of the Insurance Development Forum with the UN, World Bank and Industry leaders, launched at CoP21 Paris which is a focal point for risk modelling and sovereign disaster protection for the Global South and incubated the award-winning Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment. In 1999, as CEO of WIRE Limited he founded Artemis.bm which remains the key source for information on insurance linked securities and catastrophe bond markets.
At Howden, Rowan has led the delivery of the first phase of work with the European Investment Bank, and co-authored the final deliverable ‘Insurance and Risk Management Tools for Agriculture in the EU’. More broadly, has also held other positions as an advisory board member at the Centre for Global Development – Catastrophe Insurance for Humanitarian and Emergency Assistance, sat on the Climate Adaptation Research and Innovation Board as well as, Transition Plan Taskforce Adaptation Working Group
Beyond insurance, Rowan was appointed to the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science & Technology 2011-2016 and served on the UK Green Finance TaskForce. He is a fellow at the Royal Geographical Society and in 2016 he was made a CBE for services to the economy for risk insurance and sustainable growth.
Client Relationship & Business DevelopmentClient Relationship & Business DevelopmentAndrew leads and develops Climate Risk and Resilience relationship with clients, working across Howden business and from within the large and complex client team.
This follows 7 years in the insurance industry heading global client relationships for the understanding, the analysis and the mitigation of risk, including geopolitics and climate. Leading large client accounts, he has worked with business executives and respective c-suites of various sectors and geographies, helping to qualify and quantify risk and to identify and manage the risk transfer solutions. This included building relations with industry groups, research organisations and international structures. A speaker at geopolitical and strategic security forums and actively engaged in thought leadership.
This follows 32 years in the UK Armed Forces as a senior officer experienced in strategy, risk mitigation and international relations, working the full remit of threat mitigation, strategic risk and crisis response, including geopolitics and climate security. His roles included both risk owner and senior leader across international and defence tasks and in multiple geographies, NATO, the United Nations and with various levels of Industry. Bi-lateral mentor and advisor and responsibility for delivering formal training.
Andrew has a KCL Master’s in Defence Studies, a CMI Diploma in Strategic Direction and Leadership and has completed the UK Defence Academy senior course in Strategic Leadership.
Deputy Chair, CRRDeputy Chair, CRRAnthony is a well-known global leader in the fields of climate finance, law, international policy development, philanthropy and sustainability where he has worked since 1990. He speaks and writes widely on these topics. In 2014 Anthony was invited by the then UN Secretary General to address the UN Climate Summit from the UN General Assembly Hall.
In additional to his role as Deputy Chair for Howden’s Climate Risk & Resilience team he is currently the Senior Strategic Advisor at the Inevitable Policy Response (IPR), Adjunct Professor at the Singapore Institute for Technology, Chair of the Climate Action Advisory Board, Co-Chair of the Carbon Tracker Advisory Board, Member of the Climate Bonds Advisory Board and member of the Editorial Board of the journal Carbon & Climate Law Review (CCLR). He is a former Executive Fellow at the World Economic Forum's Centre for Nature and Climate, Executive Director at the Mission Possible Partnership, CEO at the Carbon Tracker Initiative, Global Head, Climate Finance and Sustainability & Partner at the Global Law Firm, Norton Rose Fulbright and General Counsel to the €1bn climate fund at Climate Change Capital.
His experience, passion, consistent delivery and profile have helped him to develop a leading reputation in these fields. He brings a long-term, strategic perspective to all his roles. Combining this with his legal expertise, proven diplomacy skills, work in the energy, banking, finance and NGO sectors, scientific training and collaborative style he is a highly effective leader who has proven his ability to identify key new areas of relevance for the corporate sector and to grow multiple organisations and new business lines in response.