The Best Climate Campaign You Have Never Heard Of
Could there be a single lever in the global marketplace that could transform the stakes for climate change? Yes – the insurance industry. Over the past 5 years insurance has been turned upside down by a nimble network of climate campaigners that have set new rules to end insurance for fossil fuel projects. This is the story of the Sunrise Project, the Insure our Future coalition, and the global and Australian distributed networks that have turned the world of insurance around.
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TRANSCRIPT
HOST
If you wanted to prevent the worst ravages of climate change, who would you target?
The coal industry perhaps? But what if that lever was stuck. What else could you do?
Target the banks that fund it? Yep definitely.
Build a lot of renewables and make coal redundant? That’s a good idea too.
You could stop a big coal mine from being built in say Brazil, or in Queensland Australia. Yep – they are all good ideas.
But there is something else you could do that might have an even bigger impact. Imagine you could re-shape the rules of the game that determine whether a coal project gets built at all.
Am I talking about a government rule? No.
I’m talking about something far more powerful. Something that every business must pay attention to, no matter who they are, where they are, and no matter how many politicians they try to payoff.
I’m talking about insurance. What if you could change the rules of the insurance industry, so that coal and gas projects became uninsurable?
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:21:48] They are so central to the issue in terms of managing risk, like they’re the ultimate risk managers in the global global economy. They’re the ones that are paying out damage from impacts of climate change. [00:22:01][13.1]
HOST
The insurance industry has a lot to lose out of climate change. Their business is about managing risk and climate change is about the biggest risk you can imagine. And usefully, insurance is central to the energy industry.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:22:23] the fact that you can’t build a coal plant, a gas plant, an oil pipeline, you can’t build anything without insurance. So they potentially have a hard lever to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry [00:22:37][10.3]
HOST
That’s John Hepburn from the Sunrise Project.
What he’s saying is not quite true. On rare occasions, a company might build a project without insurance, but it’s a super risky thing to do, and a vanishingly small number of companies ever try it.
John’s a lifelong environmental campaigner from Australia, and he founded the Sunrise Project in 2012 to keep coal and gas in the ground.
And just so we’re clear – the Sunrise Project isn’t related to Sunrise Movement – the enormous climate youth movement based in the United States.
For years John has worked with others to try all the options he could find to generate breakthrough climate action. But for so long, it wasn’t enough.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:30:47] back in 2016, we were looking at this massive global pipeline of new coal power stations where you’ve got the scientists of the world saying we need to phase out coal as quickly as possible and then you’ve got proposals for hundreds of new coal plants around the world. And so in trying to think about, well, how do you stop all of those? Yes, we as a global movement need to fight each one of those at a local level in those communities. But that you need to look for the what about what are the cross-cutting interventions where with by shifting one part of the system, you could prevent all of those coal plants going ahead… Speaker 2: [00:31:29] And that’s where the power of the insurance industry became really obvious because they are critical to making all of those projects happen. [00:31:35][6.4]
[00:31:29][42.3]
HOST
At the time people warned John against this idea.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:25:13] we spoke with a whole lot of financial analysts and insurance industry insiders who all just said, Yes, you were able to push insurers on the asset management side because there’s a real there are financial risks for them for not taking climate change seriously in terms of stranded asset risk. But you will never get them to shift on underwriting because it’s purely a moral argument, because when you underwrite you, only you’re not holding long term risk. [00:25:45][32.2]
Speaker 2: [00:25:51] So it’s purely a moral argument, and it’s a waste of time. You shouldn’t even try doing it. [00:25:57][6.2]
HOST
Fast forward to 2021, and things have changed dramatically. Even Antonio Guterres (Gu-terres) the UN Secretary-General thinks it’s key tool in addressing climate change, as he recently told the Insurance Development Forum.
ANTONIO GUTERRES
1.51-2.00
We need net zero commitments to cover your underwriting portfolios and this should include the underwriting of coal and all fossil fuels. COP 26 must signal the end of coal.
HOST
Today on ChangeMakers we are in Sydney Australia bringing you the story about one of the most far-reaching climate policy changes in recent history.
We are tracking the Insure our Future campaign that Sunrise initiated to drive the Insurance Industry out of fossil fuels. The campaign used a series of novel network strategies to coordinate across nations, towns and companies. It produced a new kind of corporate campaign that made the impossible possible in the global insurance industry. How did they do it? Let’s go.
HOST
I’m Amanda Tattersall, welcome to Changemakers, the podcast telling stories about people changing the world. This episode was produced by Isabella Morand and supported by the Sunrise Project.
We are supported by the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. They break down barriers between researchers, policy makers and community campaigners so we can build change together. Check them out at sydney dot E D U dot A U backslash policy dash lab.
And you can sign up to our email list at changemakerspodcast.org.
HOST
Before we take a short lesson in how the global insurance industry works, we need to look at the history of climate politics so we can understand why anyone was thinking about insurance in the first place.
To do that, we need to revisit Copenhagen 2009.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:12:36] there was this great moment when world leaders were coming together, Obama, from Australia that we had Kevin Rudd and there was expectation, so much expectation that this was going to be the breakthrough meeting that was going to lead to a new era of action on climate change. And it was just a diabolical failure. [00:13:01][13.8]
[22.4]
HOST
Diabolical failure. It caused many campaigners to re-examine their strategy.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [00:13:18] And I think from that there was this real sense that politics was just not working. It’s it’s incredibly important. But the political dynamics at play in different countries just meant that there was this lowest common denominator outcome at a global level, and we are not going to solve the climate crisis through that mechanism alone. [00:13:40][20.2]
[21.6]
Speaker 2: [00:13:45] If politics is not the solution … then what are the other options? And the other is how the centre of power globally to solve the climate crisis is the corporate sector [00:13:59][13.9]
HOST
Bill McKibben, founder of the global climate campaign 350, had been leading in this space. For years 350 had been pushing for large institutions – universities, foundations, local governments – to divest – that is cut their financial ties – with fossil fuel companies.
Alongside this, in places as far apart as the Tar Sands in North America, coal mines in Australia and oil fields in South America – local movements had been targeting financial institutions to stop funding them.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:16:06] so you’re seeing bits and pieces of breakthroughs in finance, and it just felt that there was something there that had bigger potential for global systemic change [00:16:15][9.1]
HOST
It was in this context that something happened that changed things for John.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:16:22] I didn’t apply for it. [00:16:25][2.4]
HOST
It was John Hepburn’s lucky day.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:16:24] It was announced that these foundations were going to be looking for a way to innovate with climate philanthropy and wanted to choose individuals that had a track record of making interesting change happen. [00:16:39][14.5]
HOST
This was big. In 2016 the Climate Breakthrough Award was launched, and in their first year they would give two winners a grant of $2 million a year for three years to do whatever climate work they wanted to do.
So they started scouring the planet for people.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:16:41] … I remember seeing it and thinking, that’s a great idea. I’m excited to see who they who they find. And then I was told that I’d been nominated for it, and I was, to be honest, shocked and thought, Well, that’s flattering. But you know, there’s not a chance that I would be seriously considered [00:17:04][23.0]
HOST
Then this happened.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:17:32] … I was just sitting at home late at night as 10 o’clock … and this email came in and I just I couldn’t I just literally couldn’t compute because I was it. My initial thought was I can’t deal with the responsibility of that. I feel like it’s they must’ve picked the wrong guy. And I’m just, yeah, like, I just felt like, surely there’s somebody else I should have chosen instead of me. And it took me quite a while to get over that feeling, to be honest. [00:18:05][32.2]
HOST
John now had $2 million dollars a year for 3 years that he could use on any campaign that he wanted. That amount of money changed things.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:18:45] One of the challenges of working in NGOs in an activist organisation is you get so used to a poverty mentality that you end up asking the question, What’s the best thing for us to do? Given a whole lot of constraints of funding and brand and constituency and all of these other constraints.
HOST
This time he could ask a different question.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:19:12] What is actually required to win, what’s required to shift this system? And that was the real gift of the climate breakthrough grant to just push me and support me to think, Well, how do you have the biggest possible global impact? [00:19:25][13.0]
HOST
Having won the Award, John’s mind quickly turned to the financial markets that supported fossil fuels. But which financial levers made sense? He drew some people together.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:19:53] And so we just did this little experiment where we had two meetings, one in Sydney, one in San Francisco, and we pulled together the most senior finance professionals we could find from different parts of the finance sector and the Chatham House rule conversations. We had very senior people from large institutions who were there, you know, with real confidentiality. And then we had the most disruptive activists that we know who are interested in finance and we locked them in a room. [00:20:23][29.5]
HOST
An unusual alliance.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:20:23] I did a conceptual map on the wall of how I think the global financial system works in relation to fossil fuels and then said, you know, first, let’s make this a better map. And then secondly, where are the intervention points in the system where if you shift one actor, it will have catalytic global impact to shift the whole financial system out of fossil fuels and from both of those conversations. We identified the insurance industry and reinsurance industry and BlackRock and the big three asset managers as key sort of concentration points within the global financial system that have the potential to shift the world out of fossil fuels. [00:21:03][19.7]
[39.1]
HOST
Insurance. Until then it hadn’t been a focus, but as I said – it sits at the centre of everything.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:28:43] So climate change is fundamentally and is the biggest cause of climate change is digging up and burning fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas. And every one of those coal, oil and gas projects needs money to be built and needs insurance to manage risk. You can’t build a coal power station or a gas pipeline or a solar farm, for that matter, without finance and without insurance. [00:29:12][29.9]
HOST
It’s important. But let’s take a minute to understand how it actually works. Let’s go to insurance school!
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:23:24] insurance companies basically do two things. They sit on large pools of capital. That is the money they used to be paying out insurance claims, and they manage that money. So that’s one side of the business. The other side is the underwriting where they are providing insurance to different activities. [00:23:41][16.7]
HOST
Celine Soubranne is the Head of Sustainability at AXA one of Europe’s leading Insurance Agencies, and she describes the industry in the same way.
CELINE
Speaker 1: [00:08:53] we play as an investor and as an insurer. So that’s really what is the insurance about. [00:09:03][9.9]
HOST
So let’s clarify – insurance has two sides to its business.
First there is the money they collect from you when you get insurance.
I insure my car, I pay them cash. But if I smash my car, they have to pay out that claim. What they do with my cash in the meantime is invest it in assets. That’s the asset management side of insurance.
The other side is the process by which they provide, or don’t provide, insurance for projects. A project can be anything from my car, to a house, or … a massive coal mine. This is called underwriting.
So far so good. But how does that relate to the fossil fuel industry?
Insurers are big investors. That money side of the business is big capital. Climate campaigners had already been arguing that insurance companies needed to divest from fossil fuels. They needed to change the asset management side of their business to take into account the fact that extreme weather events will massively impact their industry. They shouldn’t be investing in stuff that will cause them to pay out more.
And in 2015, that was the way insurers were looking at climate change.
CELINE
Speaker 1: [00:12:23] I think it’s about risk … it was the starting point. [00:12:40][16.9]
HOST
But the global breakthrough that John was seeking was to have insurance companies change how they issued their premiums – that is – he wanted them to change their process for underwriting projects.
Changing that side of the business would be harder.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:25:42] because when you underwrite you, only you’re not holding long term risk. You just write an insurance contract for one year or two years, possibly three years. [00:25:52][9.8]
HOST
The challenge was, how could they get insurance companies to change how they issued insurance policies in the same way that they might care about their investments.
<MUSIC SFX ?> – optimistic, cheeky, background
John and his team had one other thing on their side. The insurance industry had for a long time talked up how good they were on all things climate change.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:21:11] So the insurance industry have been talking a great game on climate change for a very long time. I think Munich Re, I think it was 1963,
HOST
Actually it was 1973.
JOHN HEPBURN
(cont previously) … they first put out their first report on climate change, talking about how important it was and the urgency of action. Almost 50 years later, that same company is still investing in underwriting fossil fuels and the things that are making climate change worse. And so there is this really obvious hypocrisy. If there was an award for hypocrisy on climate change globally, the insurance industry would win it. [00:21:48][37.0]
HOST
The godfather of community organising Saul Alinksy had a saying about that. In his book Rules for Radicals he argued that a powerful tactic “makes the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Sunrise’s job would be to get the global insurance industry to walk their talk on climate change.
<END MUSIC>
====
HOST
So John had a target and a goal, but where should he start?
LUCIE PINSON
Speaker 2: [00:15:29] you need to know. Who is going to move first and who is in your capacity to first of all that you are going to push or convince or constraint to move for us, but you need to know where Domino will start. And that’s very important because that’s just the first rule of campaigning. [00:15:53][23.9]
HOST
That’s Lucie Pinson. She is a social justice finance campaigner based in Paris.
Lucie had worked with John before as part of an established network of European NGOs that worked on finance campaigns, including a global campaign to get financial institutions to divest from a major coal project in the Galilee Basin in Australia. She was an ideal ally for a campaign on insurance.
She had her own theory about how action on insurance could work.
LUCIE PINSON
Speaker 2: [00:06:08] I am from France, which is a country with an energy mix based mostly on you on nuclear and nuclear is and is something that you can’t insure, it’s the private sector can’t insure. And I really like already so I did in 2015 and 2016 seeks to make coal and fossil fuels uninsurable. [00:06:33][25.0]
HOST
Lucie was in the right place to start this campaign.
LUCIE PINSON
Speaker 2: [00:17:56] Europe, because historically. The European financial institutions have always been more progressive on climate and ESG issues. [CUT HERE] [00:18:16][19.6]
HOST
John saw it the same way.
JOHN
Speaker 2: [00:33:30] We started in Europe. That’s where the context is easiest for shifting companies on climate change because the employees of those companies are coming to work every day in a context where they just expect that the community, their peers, their children, their families care about action on climate change. So we decided to start in Europe and basically wanted to build some momentum. So we went after the easiest companies first and tried to create a domino effect. [00:34:03][32.9]
HOST
Europe had been at the centre of climate policy. In 2015 Paris had hosted COP 21 – the famous heads of government meeting that had led to the Paris Agreement.
The intensity increased in 2017 as President Macron decided to one up President Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ by offering to make the entire planet great through a One Planet Summit.
LUCIE
[00:20:58] this huge One Planet summit, which is going to be like a huge party where we’re going to invite the private sector to make commitments on climate and and the more the finance industry, including the instruments. Industry actually claims to be doing something on climate. The more they asked to actually do something, they have to deliver, because otherwise they will be like call out for greenwashing. …[CUT] [00:21:49][51.6]
HOST
But even in a massive game of dominos, you still need to choose the first domino to fall.
<MUSIC SFX> – dramatic
John quickly hired a project leader – Peter Bosshard – who came on board to bring the insurance campaign to life.
Peter commissioned a report from an Amsterdam based team called Profundo. It provided a mud-map of the European insurance industry, breaking down insurance companies based on size and scope. It documented the extent to which each was involved in the coal and climate sectors. Most importantly, it uncovered every company’s fossil fuel underwriting policy.
The report helped the team undertake what campaigners call a ‘power analysis’ – making assessments as to who should be engaged first, and which companies might help other companies change.
All roads led to France.
AXA and Allianz were two of the biggest insurers. They had big portfolios, they didn’t have policies on underwriting but they were high profile when talking about climate change and Environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG.
LUCIE
Speaker 2: [00:41:53] You have some financial institutions who like to show off. And AXA is one of them. They really like publicity [00:42:02][9.8]
Speaker 2: [00:42:25] which is a good thing. I mean, I love that they of are actually there to dare to take bold changes, but they are on the other spécifique like capacity to do it because they really like to to show off. [00:42:39][14.6]
HOST
AXA also didn’t just like to be out in front, but they also wanted to lead change across the Industry. As Celine from AXA describes.
CELINE
Speaker 1: [00:21:41] what is important for us is to be exemplary on the whole insurance on investment related activities, but also yes to act collectively [00:21:55][14.1]
HOST
AXA had all the ingredients for being a first mover.
Then in April 2017, in the months leading up to the One Planet Summit, it all started to happen. Indeed two things happened on the very same day.
First – Sunrise helped to launch the Unfriend Coal campaign – a broad alliance designed to take on the insurance industry’s underwriting of coal.
That very same day AXA came out and declared that it would no longer offer insurance to a class of large mining and energy companies.
It was huge.
LUCIE
Speaker 2: [00:41:14] The criteria was not that great, but the approach was fantastic. And then we could build on that to us and push other insurers to do the same thing and to adopt the same kind of criteria. [00:41:26][12.2]
<MUSIC SFX – Change in gear (text is going internal – faster but undercurrent music – needs to be quiet cause the next quote is tongue in cheek funny)>
HOST
With this quick success – the campaign had a lot of work to do to get its own house in order and prepare it for taking on this complex global industry.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:07:50] there’s a quote from this quote from Sun Tzu … there’s a quite some sense of basically says, if you know yourself but don’t know your enemy, then you’ll sort of you’ll win some, you lose some. If you don’t know yourself and don’t know your enemy, you’ll lose every time. [00:08:14][24.2]
Speaker 2: [00:08:13] And if you know yourself and know your enemy, you’ll pretty much win every time. [00:08:19][5.6]
HOST
So they asked themselves – who are we?
LUCIE
Speaker 2: [00:22:22] first, we you need to to build you narrative that’s going to be very important. And then you need to win your demands, … And then you will need to build your mobilisation power, I would say, like really the tactics that’s going to hurt the insurance industry. [00:22:46][24.1]
HOST
Narrative, demands, and mobilisation power – let the war begin.
===
<Alternate MUSIC if earlier doesn’t work>
HOST
First they had to address their power to mobilise.
LUCIE
[00:30:07] And the difficulty of the campaign is that not only we are based in different countries, we have different we are evolving in a different political context. We speak different languages, but we also have maybe one or two insurers only in our country. If you are working on Italy, you only have Generali to fight inside the insurance industry. If you are based in France, you only have AXA 00:30:38][30.5]
HOST
These challenges created an opportunity. Jason Mogus is a campaign designer who helped work on the insurance campaign.
JASON MOGUS
Speaker 2: [00:10:58] there’s no NGO that covers all those bases. You can’t just select one group gave them a giant grant and expect them to go [00:11:07][8.5]
HOST
They didn’t need a big global NGO. What they needed was a network.
LUCIE
[00:29:42] we were scattered in different NGOS, one in Italy, one in Switzerland and one in Germany, one in France. The Sunrise project was coordinating, and we had already one partner, I believe, at that time in the U.S. [00:30:00][18.4]
HOST
Two things made this network work.
Sunrise had plenty of resources. They had John’s Award and they combined that with other philanthropy.
But also – many of the campaigners in the network knew each other already.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:47:29] We’d been working with a range of the groups in Europe on finance for quite a number of years and had, I think, a reasonable level of trust. It wasn’t the smoothest process … it’s it’s always tricky. The dynamic around funding, when there is new resources coming into a movement who has access to those resources, how they’re being deployed, what sort of things invariably a range of tensions and dynamics between different organisations. … [CUT] … across the movement has just been this real willingness, though, to just try and figure out how we can build bigger collective impact and a real commitment to a globalist view where the power of the whole is, you know, is greater than the sum of its parts. And so that made it much easier. [00:48:27][43.1]
[55.3]
HOST
This dynamic network created a reach that a single organisation couldn’t achieve. All the staff were local to their countries. They knew the distinctive political contexts and the opportunities and barriers that came with them.
Together they could do something that none of the campaigners could do alone. They could build momentum.
LUCIE
[00:30:49] It’s going to be hard publicly to make a story just on getting AXA because you can’t create this type of domino effect [00:30:57][7.3]
HOST
This meant they had to work on their narrative.
LUCIE
[00:23:37] the insurance industry is here to protect us. And you actually to any have a narrative showings and to insurers about pretending protecting us are actually making your sick and actually fuelling climate change, which is going to threaten our future. [00:24:08][30.5]
HOST
Climate change is going to threaten our future.
The insurance industry likes to project the image that they’re our friends, who help us when we’re in trouble. The campaigners tried to upend that, by linking them directly to the trouble they were underwriting. They called themselves Unfriend Coal.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:46:51] … the Unfriend Coal campaign and later that morphed into the Insure Our Future campaign, which built the global story and provided the overarching narrative and tools to help support all of those local campaigns. [00:47:10][19.2]
HOST
But a slogan doesn’t build a story, action does. And very quickly they had an opportunity to bring their new narrative to life.
<MUSIC SFX – mystery, light tone>
The Geneva Association is the international body for insurance companies, and in June 2017 they had a conference planned.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:42:42] So we were trying to find out where this Geneva Association meeting of insurance industry CEOs was going to be highly secretive. Meeting was not advertised, but we knew it was going to be in San Francisco and we knew roughly when.
[00:42:42] …And Casey Harold from our team at Sunrise just got on the case to investigate and find out. And I think he said he called one hundred and twenty five different hotels until he finally managed to extract the information from one hotel that they were hosting this Geneva Association event. [00:43:16][34.4]
JOHN
Bingo.
Dressed in their sharpest suits, they snuck into the conference venue – unfurled banners and gave a speech to an unsettled bunch of insurance CEOs.
<add a little protest noise under here>
<SFX Clip>
0.42-0.55
We know that the best insurance against climate change is to keep fossil fuels in the ground … divest .. unfriend coal now.
Keep in 2 chants then cut – JUST HAVE ONE CHANT
HOST
Outside, a plane flew around the centre of the city with a sign saying ‘Insurers Insure our future now.’
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:40:31] … I think it was a real shock for them. And up until that point, none of them had been held accountable for this vast hypocrisy of the insurance industry and the companies that they were responsible for leading. [00:40:42][10.2]
<Slight gap>
HOST
There was one more plank to Lucie’s strategy. Demands.
Changing the insurance industry required the campaigners to deeply understand the organisations they were contesting. Slogans might work for a narrative, but they wouldn’t work in a negotiation.
LUCIE
[00:26:21] It’s not enough to say stop coal because we don’t want them to adopt like any kind of policy on coal. [00:26:29][7.8]
[CUT LUCIE]
HOST
In its first declaration, AXA was able to say that it ‘stopped coal’, but it had only stopped large projects over a certain size.
The campaigners knew that they needed to be far more focused and explicit to actually stop coal.
Moreover, stopping coal was a big change. It wasn’t likely to be won in a single negotiation. The challenge would be about staging out change over several years.
Working out these stages required research – not just from behind a desk but by talking to industry players.
LUCIE
[00:28:48] So but at that time, we already knew what kind of demands that we are going to get and we need to know what does it mean in terms of the business that they are going to be lost by these insurers? [00:29:00][11.7]
[00:29:01] [CUT] …So we need to know, OK, how hard is this one or is this one of that one to actually be in a position to actually negotiate with these players? [00:29:18][17.5]
[29.2]
======
HOST
With their narrative, demands and mobilising network in place – the team was able to escalate their campaign across Europe through 2017 and 2018.
The network gave them an industry wide approach. Multiple insurance companies were targeted simultaneously by campaigners based in those countries.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [00:44:43] So essentially, we were trying to create a race to the top and this competitive dynamic between companies and so the ranking of the scorecard that we did was really critical to that.
HOST
The scorecard was a report. It was high impact – as Lucie describes.
LUCIE
[00:24:38] we published a report which was really like a bomb. [00:24:45][7.3]
HOST
The scorecard ranked the insurance companies, but it also showed the relationships between the countries.
LUCIE
[00:25:16] what we found at the time is that the biggest insurers of the coal industry in Poland, where Allianz, German insurer and Generalli Italian insurers, who are also life insurers. [00:25:33][17.2]
HOST
The scorecard used competition to motivate the industry. Then each company was aggressively targeted based on its idiosyncrasies.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [00:44:54] We then went about marketing that directly to executives and key and staff was the key insurance companies through and through LinkedIn and other sort of micro-targeting. You can basically communicate directly with employees of companies. It’s a, I think, a really important strategy for corporate campaigning the world over. [00:45:15][21.5]
HOST
Sunrise’s financial resources then allowed the network to move quickly to wherever the research said they needed to be.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [00:45:22] where you grant making organisation as well as a campaigning organisation, which enables us to stand up network campaigns pretty quickly. And so when we realised that, for example, Generali, an Italian insurance company, was really critical, we were able to reach out to friends and allies in the movement in Italy, provide them with some funding to give them capacity to work on the insurance campaign in Italy, as well as in Poland and in France and in the UK, in Germany [00:45:54][32.3]
HOST
The campaign began to steam roll. Insurance companies who had earlier said that they could never change their underwriting practices had created a new base line – ruling out insuring or funding fossil fuels.
Europe was becoming a new gold standard.
Speaker 2: [00:54:00] since we launched the insurance campaign, we’ve managed to get most of the European insurance industry to commit to not underwrite new coal projects. There are still some US companies that are underwriting coal, AIG, Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, a couple of others Liberty Mutual. But most of the European companies were out, [00:54:25][25.1]
HOST
Out my friends. To those people who say things can’t be done, I say you need to get better at playing dominos. As of December 2020, at least 23 insurers and reinsurers who control 12.9% of the primary insurance market and 48.3% of the reinsurance market have now ended or limited their cover for coal projects. And at least 65 insurers with combined investments worth $12 trillion have either adopted a divestment policy or committed to making no new investments in coal. Those included all major European insurers and reinsurers.
But there is one notable exception – the Lloyd’s market.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [00:54:26] it [00:54:28][2.5]
Speaker 2: [00:54:28] became clear that Lloyd’s of London was becoming the insurer of last resort for the coal industry. And they are really significant player globally. That’s a big, big provider of insurance to the coal industry. And so it’s this, you know, there are loopholes in many of the company policies. But Lloyd’s was just this biggest gaping hole. [00:54:51][22.3]
[24.8]
Speaker 2: [00:51:11] The Lloyd’s insurance market is different to most insurance companies and that it’s not an insurance company, it’s an insurance market. [CUT]
HOST
Lloyds has been around since 17th century. Inside Lloyd’s marketplace smaller insurance companies alongside many of the largest global insurers and investors come together in syndicates to provide capital and accept insurance risks. There are 93 syndicates. That network is then managed by the independent Lloyds Corporation.
Confused? Well – that’s the point. All this complexity created obstacles for anyone wanting to create accountability in Lloyds marketplace.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:52:00] But what they’ve been doing is hiding behind that and saying we can’t control what happens in the Lloyd’s market, which is absolute nonsense. They certainly can. They have on other issues and they can say well and truly what can happen within the Lloyd’s marketplace. [00:52:20][19.3]
HOST
But the question was – how do you create pressure against an entire marketplace of insurers?
John and the team turned back to the network idea that they had deployed in Europe.
Networks weren’t new to Sunrise. Quite separate to the Insurance campaign, Sunrise had been using Jason Mogus’s idea of a directed network as a way to support a campaign against Australia’s largest proposed new mine in the Galilee Basin. It was called the Stop Adani campaign.
Since 2017, 100s of Stop Adani groups had formed in cities and in regional areas to take action against the mine. But when the 2019 Federal Election didn’t go as they hoped politically, the Adani campaign doubled down on trying to weaken its pillars of financial support support.
You’ll never guess what they found.
HOST
Speaker 2: [00:54:53] we found out from the Adani campaign in Australia, … that [00:55:08][2.0]
Speaker 2: [00:55:09] Lloyds was likely to be the insurer that was underwriting that project. [00:55:14][5.4]
[19.1]
Speaker 2: [00:55:14] And, you know, so many other companies had explicitly ruled out insuring the Adani mine. Lloyds hadn’t. And so it just felt like Lloyds was the next most important target that we needed to somehow figure out how we could shift. [00:55:28][14.0]
HOST
It was a eureka moment in more ways than one. At the start John knew that these local site fights – like the Adani campaign – linked to the global work. But here – he joined the dots.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [00:55:45] which which was done [00:55:47][1.3]
Speaker 2: [00:55:48] purely coincidence. It was not by design. We were trying to figure out what’s the systemic impact across the global financial system on coal. Focussing on insurance at the same time, we’ve been playing a really key role in driving this campaign to stop the opening up of the Galilee Basin. And it turned out that these campaigns just intersected in quite an extraordinary way. [00:56:10][21.8]
[23.1]
HOST
The intersection gave the Lloyds campaign a new kind of fire power. In addition to their wiley team of finance campaigners, they now were joined by thousands and thousands of climate activists.
But like in Europe, this dynamic between local context and a whole of industry approach would help them scale a solution.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 2: [00:56:41] Financial institutions generally don’t want to adopt policies in relation to particular projects. It’s like it doesn’t make policy sense for them. It’s incoherent. They really don’t like doing it. So they’ll always say, we need to deal with this at a sector wide, have a more coherent policy across the whole business. At the same time, it is individual projects where the impacts and consequences of the policies or lack of policies become real and become more visceral for them. And so the Adani campaign has been extraordinary globally in driving changes in the global finance sector in relation to coal because it’s been such an egregious project, [00:57:29][47.7]
[00:58:30] And so essentially what we did with with Lloyds and with the rest of the insurance industry was to go to them with Adani, this piece of kryptonite and say, Are you underwriting the Adani project? Because unless you tell us you’re not, we will assume that you are. And the Stop Adani movement in Australia has been this most extraordinary grassroots uprising [00:59:00][29.8]
[00:59:08] These grassroots groups who just just adopted a Lloyd’s syndicate member and figured out how to contact them. [00:59:16][8.1]
HOST
One local climate leader who jumped on board was Pacific Warrior – Joseph Sikulu. He’s the head of 350 Pacific and lives in Western Sydney. He’s originally from the Pacific Island of Tonga.
Climate change is already changing Joseph’s homeland. When he speaks people listen. He took a little time to join the Adani campaign initially, having first forged a deep solidarity with the Wangan and Jagalingou people in the Galilee Basin. But once he had – he became a local leader in the insurance campaign.
HOST
[00:08:27] When we established that we went all in against Lloyd’s of London. And I think the biggest tool we have as a Pacific climate warriors or as the Pacific is our moral voice. And so we try to leverage that as much as possible in terms of approaching all of these branches, approaching all of the managers appealing to everybody we can, just telling them that what they’re insuring is going to destroy our homes [00:08:55][27.6]
Speaker 2: [00:15:50] I know there are some local groups who have actually done more than who have. Adopted particularly groups, we would our tactic was just to adopt all of them, we would contact all of them because we had to do all of them here in Australia. [CUT] [00:16:05][15.6]
HOST
The local groups were relentless.
JOHN HEPBURN
[00:59:16] So you had to stop Adani Volunteer Group in Coffs Harbour that would just pick a couple of Lloyd’s syndicate members understand that key decision makers and how they, you know how to shift them and just took responsibility for contacting them and just giving them a world of grief until they adopted a policy. And so it wasn’t an NGO doing that work. Actually, it was grassroots activists picking off one company after another and just working through the entire list of Lloyd’s syndicates [CUT] [00:59:57][41.1]
HOST
LIke in Europe, it was a directed network. A general strategy was set to get Lloyds to stop underwriting coal. Then groups chose how they would take on the work.
Some like Joseph used their moral authority to speak. Others pressed individual syndicates on social media and in the streets. A single organisation would have struggled to find that level of creativity and energy. But opening the strategy up to an already activated movement produced more power than the sum of its parts.
The opaque nature of the Lloyds structure makes it hard to give a perfect account of how successful this movement has been. But Sunrise has a count of its record to date. As of October 2021 there are 37 syndicates that could insure the Adani mine. The campaign has seen 32 declare that they won’t insure Adani.
Not a bad progress report.
HOST
This is one of the most impactful climate campaigns in recent memory. But it is more than that – it has a lot to teach us about how to campaign.
You can’t change the world through lobbying government alone. I know, it’s obvious, but so often our campaigns assume that our only audience are politicians. This movement not only said that you should move the market but it showed that doing so is powerful.
John and his team have also shown that you don’t need to create big organisations to take on big market players. Decentralised coordinated networks are fit for purpose. Sure, you need to know the right people, and a bunch of money will help. But loose connections, solid strategy and limited control – not a big bureaucratic monolith – is the right vehicle for a clever international corporate campaign.
There was also something in how they took on power. Ambitious change counter-intuitively required smart scalable demands. Lucie is as ambitious as anyone, but her meticulous research skills were vital to negotiating victory. You can’t tip over all the dominos at the same time – they fall one at a time, and at an increasing rate if you play it right. A little more nuance and negotiating amidst the sloganeering works.
It’s been five years since the Breakthrough Award. I asked John what he thinks when he looks back at what he’s done.
JOHN HEPBURN
Speaker 3: [01:10:46] it feels like we’ve [01:10:47][1.0]
Speaker 2: [01:10:48] pushed a small snowball, but we spent some time making this small snowball and we thought, Well, let’s roll it this way, and we think it hopefully will get its own momentum and start rolling down the hill. And all of a sudden, it’s just got bigger and bigger and faster and just completely lost control of this massive thing that keeps on growing and it is moving faster and more powerful than we could possibly have imagined. And it just feels I feel really proud of the work that we’ve done to sort of push that little thing off the off the hill in the early days with our allies in different parts of the world. And just to see that it’s just and has become a real force for change in the world. And now you’ve got insurance companies that are starting to come out and actually do real things to push for action on climate change. You’ve got banks and other insurance companies pushing other insurance companies, and it started to create a self-fulfilling dynamic. [CUT] [01:11:51][63.5]
[64.5]
HOST
Changemakers is hosted by me, Amanda Tattersall. Remember to subscribe to this podcast to catch all our episodes. This is series 5 so there is plenty to be inspired by in our back catalogue.
This episode was written by me. It was produced by Isabella Morand. Our audio producer is Jules Wucherer and our digital manager is Lachlan Hodson. This episode was supported by the Sunrise Project and produced by Isabella Morrand.
Our sponsoring organisation is the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. They break down barriers between researchers, policy makers and community campaigners so we can build change together. Check them out at sydney dot E D U dot A U backslash policy dash lab. Like us on Facebook at changemakers podcast and check out changemakerspodcast.org for transcripts and updates on all our stories.
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