Achmea is committed to Duurzaam Samen Leven, our vision of living sustainably together. The social, moral and ecological footprint of our products and services is inextricably linked with the business operations of our partners and suppliers. Consequently, Achmea wants to understand and monitor its current and potential suppliers’ sustainability performance and enter into focused discussions with them on this.

First suppliers approached this month 
Some of Achmea’s suppliers already work with EcoVadis. Other suppliers will be approached in the near future with the request that they should also be assessed. Achmea and its suppliers will use the results to see how they can improve their sustainability performance. 

Achmea has previously announced that it is committed to climate-neutral operations by 2030, a climate-neutral investment portfolio by 2040 and a climate-neutral insurance portfolio by 2050 at the latest.

About EcoVadis
EcoVadis helps companies with sustainability benchmarking and monitoring in order to reduce risks and improve their performance. Its methodology encompasses 21 criteria in four themes: environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. The criteria are built on international sustainability standards. EcoVadis provides organisations with the key indicators and context they need to make decisions, identify new opportunities and improve performance.

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.”

Along with a number of other financial institutions, Achmea was committed to the Dutch Climate Agreement in 2019. In the same year, Achmea announced that it would no longer be investing in businesses that generated more than 30% of their revenue from coal or from the extraction of oil from tar sands. In making this announcement, Achmea wanted to send a signal to the largest polluters that they needed to take action.

[image] Five of the nine insurers surveyed scored only one satisfactory for their investment policy on 21 social issues

Willem van Duin, Chairman of Achmea’s Executive Board: “Achmea wants to contribute to a healthy, safe and future-proof society. That’s why I’m happy with our good scores in the Fair Insurance Guide, particularly when it comes to climate change. As an insurer, we are seeing an increase in the losses suffered by our customers as a result of extreme weather. Our investment policy aims to make a substantial contribution to the transition to a climate-neutral economy. In 2019, we took concrete steps in this direction. So, it’s great to see that our climate score in particular is up two points on last year’s score.”

Encouragement to do more
In spite of our good performance, we believe that there is still scope to put our operations and investment policy on a more sustainable footing. Van Duin: “We’re continuing to work hard to make a bigger social impact with our investments and our engagement programme plays an important role in this. We will use this programme to talk to companies and encourage them to make their operations more responsible.”

About Achmea’s investments

Achmea is a large insurer and pension fund manager and as such is a large investor. We invest the funds we receive from our insurance operations, such as premiums, on a proprietary basis. In addition, we invest the assets that customers entrust to us via Achmea’s own asset manager, Achmea Investment Management. These include the pension fund assets we manage or the assets of our customers’ investment accounts. We invest the insurance premiums and pension contributions from our customers and as a group we manage assets of more than €140 billion.

About the Fair Insurance Guide

The Fair Insurance Guide is a joint venture with Amnesty International, FNV, Milieudefensie, Oxfam Novib, PAX and World Animal Protection. The Fair Insurance Guide shows the extent to which the investments of insurers contribute to a socially just and sustainable world. The aim is to make the investment policy of insurers more sustainable and to align investments and business operations accordingly. The underlying aim is for insurers to use their financial and other influence to encourage the businesses in which they invest to contribute to a sustainable and socially just world.

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.

Apeldoorn is one of five key Achmea sites. There are plans to accelerate the greening of the others. For example, work is under way to connect another site to geo-thermal heating and a green roof was installed on the building in Tilburg last year. Achmea’s mobility policy is also focused on expanding the number of electric company cars and reducing the number with internal combustion engines.

Achmea identifies the CO₂ footprint of its entire business each year, looking at heating, lighting, water and paper consumption, waste, coolants, servers and mobility. In the past five years, total CO₂ emissions have fallen by 30%. As we decided we wanted to be CO₂ neutral as early as 2011, since then we have offset our emissions by purchasing VCS certificates. That policy will not be necessary after 2030. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations have been at the heart of our strategy for some time. SDG 13 Climate action is a priority.

Willem van Duin, Chairman of the Executive Board of Achmea: “Achmea wants to contribute to a healthy, safe and future-proof society. Part of that is combatting the effects of climate change. We are operating under an ambitious sustainability plan that will result in climate-neutral operations in 2030. We are working actively with other parties, for example in local and regional networks, and in co-operation with suppliers we are looking for innovative solutions. We are of course also identifying how we can make the products and services we provide to our customers greener. For example, Interpolis is offering its customers environmentally-friendly, insulating green roofs and Centraal Beheer is supplying solar panels to customers.”

A further 30 electric vehicle charging points are being installed in Apeldoorn. The first fully green electricity is due to be generated in February 2020.

The climate is changing and this is causing increasing disruption, suffering and loss for our customers and for society. Achmea’s strategy is to contribute to a healthy, safe and future-proof society, which is why Achmea today signed the Climate Agreement and why it wants to contribute concrete solutions. By signing the agreement, Achmea is supporting the Paris climate goals and the ambitions of the Dutch government.

Willem van Duin, chairman of Achmea’s Executive Board: “As an insurer, we are seeing an increase in the losses suffered by our customers as a result of extreme weather. We want to help our customers protect themselves against losses by offering insight and solutions. This will help customers become more resilient to the impact of climate change. Climate change also affects the investments we manage for our customers. As an investor, we also have an influence on the extent to which the businesses we invest in operate sustainably.”

This also makes climate change an important theme in our responsible investment policy. It also means that we can start the conversation with businesses about their role in energy transition and in reducing CO2 emissions. This week, Achmea announced that it would no longer be investing in companies that generate more than 30% of their revenue from coal or from the extraction of oil from tar sands. These companies will be placed on the exclusion list.

Together with partners, Achmea is working on developing innovations, such as BlueLabel, a service that provides insight into the impact of climate change, such as floods and extreme heat, at street level.

Achmea is seeing an increase in the damage and disruption caused by climate change. This is why we are excluding the most polluting coal companies from our investment portfolio. This industry is responsible for a very large share of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Investing in these companies is no longer compatible with Achmea’s strategy.

Intensive involvement in transition to sustainability

In addition to actively excluding investments in coal companies and tar-sand processors, Achmea will also continue to exert influence by means of its intensive engagement process. Polluting companies are actively encouraged to make their business operations greener.

Willem van Duin: “Ultimately, we only want to continue investing in companies with a policy aimed at sustainability and those that are actively contributing to the energy transition. We are engaging on this issue, for example, with the remaining mining and utility companies we invest in. We are counting on these companies being able to demonstrate that they have a policy to switch to more sustainable alternatives over a fixed time frame.”

Achmea Investment Management invests the assets of its customers, including pension funds, and is the third largest institutional asset manager in the Netherlands with more than €130 billion in assets under management.