Achmea has been offsetting its remaining CO₂ footprint since 2011 by purchasing carbon certificates. As part of its ambitious sustainability agenda, Achmea is currently investing in long-term offsetting with specific forestry projects in Australia, Iceland and elsewhere. Achmea is investing €4 million in the Land Life Company reforestation programme.

Bianca Tetteroo, chair of the Executive Board of Achmea: “As a cooperative insurance company, we want to contribute to a healthy, safe and sustainable society. We are doing this for our customers in many different ways, through our investments and of course by also looking at our own operations. We are well on the way to fully climate-neutral business operations by 2030. Step by step, we are reducing our CO₂ footprint with an ambitious sustainability plan which, among other things, addresses our energy consumption, mobility, waste flows . We offset our remaining CO₂ emissions in as natural a way as possible. Planting one million trees is, therefore, a great step. And furthermore we are aligned with the ‘EU climate action and European Green Deal’, the European target to plant three billion trees by 2030.”

A healthy, safe and sustainable society

Land Life Company will plant about one million trees for Achmea during the next three years and this will restore about 920 hectares of degraded land in Australia and Iceland. Over the next forty years, these trees will absorb about 200,000 tonnes of CO₂. Biodiversity will also be restored as Land Life Company uses a range of indigenous trees. In addition, the projects offer benefits to local communities.

Achmea and Land Life Company alliance
Achmea has been the largest external investor in the reforestation company Land Life Company since 2020 through the Achmea Innovation Fund. In this way, Achmea’s Fund is supporting Land Life Company’s mission to restore two billion hectares of degraded land around the world. Tjeerd Anema, CEO of Land Life Company: “We were delighted when Achmea joined us as an investor last year to support our mission. It’s great that this agreement means that we can now also act specifically together in the field to actively remove CO₂ from the air and restore land.”

Throughout 2019, VBDO examined the sustainability profile of thirty insurers and fifty pension funds. The investigation shone a spotlight on policy, implementation, management and transparency of sustainable investment.

As a large institutional investor with managed assets of more than €140 billion, Achmea has an influence on the companies it invests in. Last spring, Achmea tightened up its corporate responsibility policy and implemented further improvements. Climate is the key element in this. For example, Achmea recently announced that it would no longer invest in companies that generate more than 30% of their revenue from coal or from the extraction of oil from tar sands. The tightening of our policy follows the signing of the Paris climate goals and the ambitions of the government in this regard. Achmea has also committed itself to the Climate Agreement in the past year.

Willem van Duin, Chairman of Achmea’s Executive Board: “The fact that we were the second highest ranking insurer is on the one hand a great performance, but on the other it is above all an encouragement to continue as a socially responsible investor. As a cooperative insurer, we focus on long-term value creation and sustainable trading and investment is perfectly aligned with this. We aim to make a greater social impact with our investments. Our engagement programme, which involves us engaging actively with companies and entering into agreements to encourage them to operate their businesses more responsibly, is an important contribution to this.”

You can find the full report here.