29 August 2019

A petition with over 109,000 signatures from all over the world was handed to AIG at its Australia headquarters in Sydney today, calling on the company to rule out insuring the disastrous Adani Carmichael coal project.

Hundreds of people joined actions outside AIG offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as part of the petition handover, while mobile billboards containing the petition message circled around inner-Sydney.

“The Arctic is on fire, the Amazon is on fire, glaciers are disappearing, there are parts of Australia in the worst drought on record less than 10 years since the last worst drought on record ended,” Market Forces campaigner Pablo Brait told the crowd outside AIG’s offices in Melbourne.

“We’re in the midst of a mass extinction event which threatens a million species over the next 30 years. We’re seeing the systems that provide us with food, with water, with safety, collapse in front of our eyes. We don’t have any time to waste,” he said.

Fourteen global insurance companies have now ruled out providing insurance for the climate-wrecking Adani Carmichael project, including all of Australia’s major insurers as well as Liberty Mutual, Allianz, AXA and Zurich.

With climate change-related storms, floods, bushfires and heatwaves hitting insurance companies increasingly hard, it simply doesn’t make sense for insurers to get behind a massive new coal mine in an untapped coal basin. The Adani Carmichael project will destroy the land of the Wangan and Jagalingou people, take water from drought-stricken farmers, increase ship movements in the already stressed Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, and add fuel to the urgent climate crisis.

By ruling out further support for Adani Carmichael, AIG will not just be protecting its own interest but also those of all humans and other living things on this planet.

AIG has a chance to be on the right side of history. We are calling on CEO Brian Duperreault to draw a line in the sand and rule out insuring Adani.

Do you agree? Fill out the anonymous AIG staff survey below.

  • Thank you for taking the time to fill out this survey. Its purpose is to understand staff views regarding AIG’s contribution to global warming via investment in and underwriting of coal, oil and gas companies and projects, including the Adani Carmichael coal project in Queensland, Australia, and the impacts climate change is having and will have on the company.

    It is anonymous and takes two minutes to complete.

    This survey is organised by Market Forces, an independent environment group that advocates for finance and investment to be directed away from activities that harm the environment and towards activities that protect and enhance it.


  • Munich Re and Swiss Re warned at the end of 2017 that climate change threatens the entire business model of the insurance industry, due to actuaries being unable to model future risk based on past risk. In 2018 Insurance Australia Group and the NZ Reserve Bank both warned that large swathes of the globe are becoming uninsurable due to climate change.


  • Other insurance companies, such as Axa, Allianz, Chubb, QBE and Suncorp (16 in total) have started responding to increasing global warming risk by divesting their coal company shares and phasing out their underwriting of thermal coal.