Insurers can guard against greenwashing and even greenhushing by being very specific about their environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals and contextualising them effectively.
This is according to Jack Roper, group head of sustainability at Legal & General, (pictured left) who was speaking on the second day of Health & Protection’s second annual Health Summit at Tylney Hall in Hampshire.
Roper explained greenwashing was a big area of concern for regulators and organisations at the moment and at the heart of the problem is a lack of transparency and a lack of specificity.
“So unfortunately where sustainability crashes into marketing, you get greenwashing risk because, particularly where you’re talking about environment, that’s actually backed by really hard physical science and in our case really in-depth actuarial modelling for the claims that we make,” he said.
“But we all know that product marketing doesn’t operate in that world and so I think it’s just a case of ensuring claims that are made are deeply specific and really, really rigorous and very transparent.”
But at the other end of the spectrum, is greenhushing,
“The other risk is greenhushing where people don’t say anything at all,” Roper revealed.
“It’s about being really clear and really specific and also being conscious of where a specific product and a specific claim sits in the ecosystem and that’s where good corporate reporting comes in, because it helps contextualise it.”