b'OTHER TOPICS OF NOTE ESGIntroductionEnvironment, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations are increasingly high priorities for global businesses, including those that operate in the insurance industry, as ESG regulations and legislation, become more prevalent, and investor and stakeholder expectations increase around the world. Whilst social justice and sustainable, responsible, governance concerns are increasingly playing a significant role, climate issues continue to dominate headlines, and to shape business practices across multiple sectors in fundamental ways.The high profile publication of the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August 2021, during the lead up to the United Nations COP26 climate change conference, and the conference itself, ensured that the worlds attention focused acutely on the climate crisis, and the role in combatting the crisis that financial institutions, including insurers, had to play. Amongst those explicitly calling for further action from the insurance industry, in particular with regard to developing solutions to assist with climate-resilience, were the UNs Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Climate Action; and the head of the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative.Unsurprisingly, the E of ESG also continues have the most profound impact on underwriting. Whilst it remains the case that standalone climate change policiesas distinct from, say, property damage policiesare rare, but new approaches to underwriting climate-exposed risks, for example using parametric models, solutions and products, continued to emerge through the course of 2021, in significant part in response to the sheer volume of loses from natural disaster events in recent months (estimated in some quarters to be around US$74 billion in just the first half of 2021).In the context of the transition to renewable energy, for example, the significance of major insurers, in some instances, repositioning their underwriting portfolios away from the likes of coal- and oil-related risks, and towards offshore wind farms, cannot be underestimated, even though many newer technologies areto an extentunknown quantities 172|Global Insurance Industry Year in Review 2021'