Nature Tech for Insurance: Initial Working Group
Session Description
Pemberton opened this session as the starting point for an ongoing working group on nature tech and insurance. Attendees came from across catastrophe modelling, land restoration, agricultural insurance, and climate risk research, including people from the National Oceanography Centre, RootRisk, Cultivo, Nature Equity, Morphosis, and DEFRA. Discussion centred on two recurring blockers: insurers price primarily on historic loss data, which nature-based interventions don't yet have enough of, and existing ecological data (soil condition, vegetation roughness, peat presence) hasn't been translated into a form catastrophe modellers can act on. The group also discussed who ultimately pays for risk reduction, noting that government often absorbs cost through subsidy where insurance withdraws, and explored routes for pricing nature-based risk reduction into existing financial products such as carbon credit offtake agreements and green mortgages. The session closed with the group narrowing a broader list of topics down to two workstreams to take forward: water (flood and water stress) and resilience financing (heat, disaster, and built environment). Pemberton will use this to shape a problem statement for a follow-up session with named insurance and government partners.
Speakers
Alexis Smith, CEO, Pemberton
Tia Peraki, EA and Project Manager, Pemberton
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
The core blocker isn't a lack of ecological data, it's that insurers can't see what changes in their pricing model if that data gets added in. Nobody has shown them the number that would move.
Historic loss data is what insurers actually price on. Nature-based interventions are a new enough asset class that they haven't built up the claims history underwriters need.
Where insurance withdraws (flood zones, degraded agricultural land), government tends to absorb the risk through subsidy rather than a new product filling the gap, which shifts who the real customer for a solution might be.
The group converged on two workstreams rather than one broad "climate and insurance" mandate: water (flood plus water stress) and resilience financing (heat, disaster, built environment).
Pricing insurance directly into existing financial products, like carbon credit offtake agreements or green mortgages, came up as a more realistic near-term route than building new standalone insurance products.
The insurance industry's internal opacity (siloed underwriting, unclear splits between primary insurers and reinsurers, commission-based broking) was raised as its own barrier, separate from any data or modelling gap.
Regulatory constraints matter too: a farmer-led mutual insurance model, for example, would be difficult to stand up under current UK insurance law.
