One year ago today, the Swiss Export Risk Insurance SERV decided in principle to issue a bond insurance for the Kozienice gas power plant in Poland, a project the size of Switzerland’s largest nuclear power plant. The power generated by Kozienice will be more expensive than the electricity from Poland’s solar power plants, and the decision to insure the project (which has meanwhile been confirmed) violated the Swiss government’s pledge to no longer support international fossil fuel projects.

SERV conducts climate assessments for its high-emission projects. Wondering how the agency assessed the climate impacts of the Kozienice project, I asked it for a copy of its climate assessment and other documents on the project’s climate impacts under the Swiss Freedom of Information Act last November.

After lengthy consultations and a mediation process with the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, SERV last week shared the climate assessment of the Kozienice project and a few other documents with me. The documents were however heavily redacted.

Astonishingly, SERV for example blacked out all information on the CO2 emissions of the Kozienice power plant. The agency argued that such data was protected by the commercial secrecy interests of the project developer, Calik Enerji Swiss, which had furthermore agreed to strict secrecy in a contract with its customer, the Polish power utility ENEA.

This argument is not at all convincing. Since Poland is a member of the European Union, ENEA and other Polish power utilities are legally required to disclose the annual emissions of their power plants under the European Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). But even if ENEA didn’t have to disclose the Kozienice emissions under European law, Calik couldn’t sign away SERV’s obligation to comply with the Swiss transparency law in a contract with a Polish utility.

At 1,336 MW, Kozienice will have exactly the same capacity as the Gryfino Dolna Odra power plant, the largest gas power project currently operating in Poland. The EU ETS registry reveals that in 2025, Gryfino Dolna Odra produced 1,582 million tons of CO2 emissions. If we assume that Kozienice will be operated in the same way as Gryfino Dolna Odra, it will emit the same amount of CO2 as 800,000 average Swiss passenger cars.

SERV’s climate assessment analyses the Kozienice project against the four criteria of its COP26 methodology. In the document which it shared with me, SERV disclosed that the project fulfils the criterion of offering the best available technology for such projects. Suspiciously, the agency however blacked out its conclusions on the other three criteria – falling within Poland’s national climate commitments, being consistent with a 1.5°C pathway, and avoiding to lock in carbon emissions. Can we thus assume that the project doesn’t meet these criteria in SERV’s climate assessment? Indeed, another document which the agency shared with me states: “The full COP26 assessment is still pending, but it is already clear that the project does not meet SERV’s COP26 criteria.”

In conclusion it appears that SERV is supporting a project whose power will be more expensive than the electricity from Polish solar plants, which will produce the same amount of CO2 emissions as 800,000 Swiss passenger cars, and which does not meet most of SERV’s own COP26 criteria. By refusing to share detailed information on these issues, the agency is not protecting any legitimate business secrets but trying to avoid climate accountability and a political embarrassment.

SERV is supervised by Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO). According to its economic governance strategy, “SECO is committed to creating transparent, responsible and efficient economic processes in its partner countries”. The State Secretariat clearly doesn’t require the same accountability from the agencies which it supervises in Switzerland.

Kozienice is one of ten gas power projects which SERV has supported in violation of the Swiss government’s climate commitments. As the climate crisis escalates, the climate impacts of SERV’s gas power projects deserve a fully informed public debate. I have requested a mediation regarding the heavy redactions of the climate assessment for Kozienice by the Federal Information Commissioner and will share further information as it becomes available.

(Photo credit: Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf)

If you have read Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate thriller, The Ministry for the Future, you will not be able to forget the book’s harrowing opening chapter. In terrifying detail, the book describes a heatwave which breaks down the people, infrastructure and social norms in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and claims some 20 million lives.

The story often came to my mind during the sweltering heatwaves of the past two months, when a bath in a cool – or at least lukewarm – lake or river offered the only relief from the relentless heat for those who could afford it. What kind of summers will our kids experience if we don’t take urgent action?

We have not yet reached the extent of climate breakdown described in The Ministry for the Future, but we’re well on the way. Countries such as Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Algeria and Egypt have reached temperatures of more than 50°C in recent years. Farmers in growing parts of South Asia are forced work at night during summer – a practice which even Swiss farmers have started to adopt. And even if we don’t take the related droughts, famines and diseases into account, excessive heat is already killing thousands of people every year.

According to recent estimates, this summer’s heatwaves have caused at least 25,000 premature deaths in Europe, almost 12,000 of which occurred in Germany. The Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute estimates that each year, Switzerland experiences about 500 heat-related deaths. (No comprehensive data has been released on this year’s heatwave so far.) Switzerland, in other words, experiences about ten times as many heat deaths as homicides every year – without a major public outcry or political response.

Heat deaths are not only a humanitarian crisis and a political scandal. They are also a human rights violation. In April 2024, the European Court of Human Rights, in a case brought by the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, ruled that the Swiss government’s insufficient climate action violated the human right to “effective protection (...) from the serious adverse impacts of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life”.

Climate breakdown is not a natural disaster, and we have the collective power to avoid the nightmare scenario which Kim Stanley Robinson describes in his book. Whether it comes to pass is a question of political will. In Robinson’s climate thriller, governments respond to the deadly heatwave in India by creating a Ministry for the Future with far-reaching powers to fight climate change – an agency which incidentally is based in my hometown Zurich.

In real life, governments are for now still delaying and obstructing the necessary transition away from fossil fuels. The Swiss government rejected the ECHR’s ruling by arguing that it was already doing enough to mitigate climate change, primarily through the Climate Protection Act which Swiss voters had approved in 2023. Remarkably, as the investigative journalist Alex Tiefenbacher just documented, it has however refused to implement its legal mandate to reduce the emissions financed by Switzerland’s powerful banks and insurers. Only last week, the government also expressed its opposition to the popular initiative demanding more climate action by the Swiss financial center. The responsible Federal Councillor even questioned whether Switzerland will fulfil its obligations under the Climate Protection Act – the very law which his government uses the reject further climate action as mandated by the ECHR.

It’s difficult not to despair in the face of the cynical response of the Swiss and other governments to the deepening climate crisis. But despair is not an option. In Switzerland we need to make sure that climate breakdown is a hot topic on the agenda when voters elect a new parliament next year.

A new briefing paper by the Insure Our Future campaign finds that Swiss Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company, is turning from a climate leader into a climate laggard. While Munich Re, Hannover Re and SCOR have taken modest if insufficient steps to restrict their support for new LNG terminals, the Swiss reinsurance giant is rolling back its climate commitments under its new CEO Andreas Berger:

· As reported earlier, Swiss Re has withdrawn from its commitment to get its net-zero targets independently validated under the Science Based Targets initiative.

· The reinsurer has started to downplay climate risks. Its annual flagship report about natural catastrophes for example contained a mere five references to climate change in 2026, compared with 105 mentions in 2020.

· In spite of repeated requests, Swiss Re has refused to restrict the underwriting of new LNG terminals even in ecologically fragile areas like the Coral Triangle. Last week its security staff manhandled a group of climate activists who tried to submit a letter on the topic to its London office.

· In 2024, Munich Re’s estimated premium revenue from fossil fuel projects were three times smaller than its renewable energy premiums. In contrast, Swiss Re’s estimated fossil fuel revenues were three times bigger than its renewable energy premiums.

· Swiss Re claims that the share of its oil and gas premiums derived from companies aligned with net-zero targets increased to 73% in 2025. Yet the criteria it uses to determine net-zero alignment are so weak that they include companies which are currently expanding their oil or gas production. (The weakening of Swiss Re’s criteria for net-zero alignment happened before Andreas Berger took over as CEO.)

A world of utter climate chaos is no longer insurable. As Günther Thallinger, a member of Allianz’s management board, warned in March 2025, “we are fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks”. Yet in a narrow, short-sighted perspective, reinsurance giants like Swiss Re are benefiting from climate change.

The secret sauce of reinsurance companies is the modelling of risk. Sophisticated risk models allow them to predict the frequency and severity of damage events, finetune their rates and manage their overall exposure to risk. But modelling complex hazards like climate risks is very expensive. Swiss Re employs more than 50 scientists and has developed approximately 200 proprietary models to assess natural catastrophe risks. This is an effort which many smaller and medium-sized reinsurance companies can no longer keep up with.

In recent years, several medium-sized reinsurers like Markel, Axis Capital, AXA XL and AIG Re have stopped or reduced the underwriting natural catastrophes such as climate risks. Since customers want a broad range of risks to be covered, these reinsurers will lose business to giants like Swiss Re, which continue to underwrite climate risks. Over the longer term, the climate crisis is thus driving business towards the insurance giants.

Like other reinsurance companies, Swiss Re has responded to the climate crisis by increasing rates and pushing a larger share of climate risks on to their customers, the primary insurers. These insurers have in turn increased their own rates and stopped offering cover in particularly climate-affected regions such as California, Florida, the US Gulf Coast as well as parts of Australia and Europe. (They never offered their services in much of the global South in the first place.)

While the world is tumbling towards climate chaos and widening uninsurability, Swiss Re’s narrow, short-sighted approach has been highly lucrative. The reinsurance giant has regularly boasted profit margins of more than 15 percent in recent years. The bonuses and dividends associated with such returns will make Swiss Re’s CEO, board of directors and shareholders happy. The roll-back of climate commitments will also please the Trump administration in the US, where Swiss Re does half of its business. It leaves everybody else worse off.

When corporate actors abdicate their responsibilities, regulators must step in. A popular initiative which was recently handed in stipulates that large Swiss financial institutions must align their business activities with the country’s climate goals and stop supporting new fossil fuel projects such as gas fields and LNG terminals. Swiss Re has just demonstrated again why such measures are necessary.

Switzerland is a small country with a big financial center attached to it (or maybe rather, a big financial center with a small country attached to it). Switzerland ranks #100 in terms of population, but among the world’s 10 largest financial centers and at the very top when it comes to managing private overseas wealth.

A study by McKinsey estimates that the lending and investments of the Swiss financial center are linked to 700-900 million tons of CO2 equivalents per year, or 14-18 times Switzerland’s domestic emissions. This estimate doesn’t include the emissions of the overseas projects and operations insured by Swiss insurance companies and the international bonds underwritten by Swiss banks. It must thus be considered conservative.

“The federal government ensures that the Swiss financial center makes an effective contribution to low-emission development that is resilient to climate change”, Switzerland’s climate protection law, which voters approved in 2023, stipulates. “In particular, measures should be taken to reduce the climate impact of national and international financial flows.” This goal is in line with the Paris Agreement and regulatory developments in other countries. Yet so far, the Swiss government has not adopted any binding measures to turn the mandate into reality.

The failure of self-regulation

Swiss financial institutions and their powerful lobbies have resisted government regulation of their climate impacts for a long time, arguing that they will address these impacts through their corporate social responsibility, i.e. through self-regulation. Yet their voluntary efforts have failed spectacularly. UBS, Zurich and Swiss Re have all abandoned their participation in net-zero industry associations once the US fossil fuel lobby and its politicians, unsurprisingly, started to put pressure on them.

Five years after adopting net-zero targets, UBS, Zurich and Swiss Re have not developed methods to measure the emissions which they facilitate through their core business activities. Swiss Re and Zurich have also withdrawn from their obligations under the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), which means that they will not let compliance with their net-zero targets be validated independently.

UBS had never made commitments under the SBTi in the first place. In a scorecard which ShareAction published in December 2025, the Swiss bank scored lowest among 25 European banks regarding its environmental performance overall, and 24^th out of 25 in regard to its climate policies. With investments of $45 billion, UBS was Europe’s second biggest institutional investor in fossil fuels in 2024.

New popular initiative

Swiss banks and insurers undermine the clean energy transition which Swiss people have voted for, and self-regulation will clearly not change this. In November 2024, a coalition of environmental organizations, financial experts and politicians of many political stripes launched a popular initiative which aims to accelerate the transition of Switzerland’s international financial institutions from fossil fuels to clean energy.

The initiative demands that Swiss financial institutions align their international business activities with globally agreed temperature and biodiversity goals. They can no longer finance or insure the exploration and development of new fossil fuel extraction projects in particular. The Swiss government needs to support these goals, and their implementation will be reviewed by a supervisory agency.

Today the organizations behind the initiative (on whose board I sit) submitted 145,972 signatures supporting the initiative to the Swiss federal chancellery. “The financial sector remains the most important lever for climate and nature conservation,” said Jon Pult, a member of parliament, during the handing-in ceremony. “We can no longer afford to have billions of francs flowing through Switzerland into the exploitation of coal and oil or the destruction of rainforests.”

The Swiss government and parliament will now deliberate the initiative in a lengthy political process, and a vote on it will probably only take place in 2028. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Swiss Wall Street Journal, has speculated that the initiative may have good chances at the voting booth. Swiss banks and insurance companies should recognize the writing on the wall and start to get serious about the clean energy transition.

As the founder and long-time coordinator of the Insure Our Future campaign, I have followed the climate policies of Swiss Re for many years, and have mostly considered your company a responsible actor on climate change:

· In 2018, you were the first reinsurer to stop underwriting new coal projects.

· In 2022, Swiss Re was the second reinsurer to restrict support for new oil and gas fields, quickly following the first mover on the topic.

· You were also the first reinsurer to adopt science-based climate targets.

· And in all the climate scorecards which our campaign has published since 2017, Swiss Re ranked in the top-5 of 30 large insurance companies.

Now the latest frontier of the fossil fuel transition is liquefied gas, or LNG. If we continue to build, finance and insure lots of new LNG terminals, we will lock the world into many more decades of gas dependency.

Swiss Re says it was “built to lead”. So my question is: when will Swiss Re stop underwriting new LNG terminals? You have at least four good reasons to do so:

First, climate change: Gas produces less greenhouse gas emissions than coal when it’s burnt. Yet if we also consider the leakage from extracting, transporting and liquefying gas, LNG has worse climate impacts than coal – not least because it leaks methane, which over the next decades is much more aggressive than CO2, the main emission from coal.

Second, economics: Last year, the average cost of solar power with battery storage was 25 USD/MWh. The average cost of electricity from a gas power plant was 38 USD/MWh. While the cost of solar power and batteries continues to drop, the cost of gas is holding steady or spiking. In recent weeks, California or Pakistan have saved billions of dollars because they have switched from gas to solar power in time.

Third, energy security: The main sources of LNG are Russia, the US and the Middle East. For political and military reasons, supply of gas from all these sources can be switched off at a moment’s notice. This is not the case for solar and wind power, combined with battery storage.

And finally, shareholder value: Many financial analysts consider climate leadership a sign of far-sighted management. To mention one example, in 2020 Société Générale increased their target price for Swiss Re shares by 5% because your company had done so well in our scorecard report. That was a billion dollar bonus for climate leadership!

In spite of this, Swiss Re has not shown leadership when it comes to LNG. For the first time, Munich Re was the first reinsurer to restrict support for LNG under their new CEO, in January. We are still waiting for a response from Swiss Re. This is all the more concerning since you have withdrawn from the Science Based Targets Initiative since last year’s AGM.

Recent weeks have demonstrated that the transition away from fossil fuels is not happening gradually, but in fits and spurts. As a far-sighted company, Swiss Re should position itself early for the transition away from fossil fuels. This includes ending support for new LNG terminals, which are not a responsible choice in today’s environment.

So again, my question: when will Swiss Re stop underwriting new LNG terminals? Thank you for your attention.

(Photo credits: Miriam Künzli/Campax; Nora Scheel/Campax)

A gas power plant in Africa (photo credit Africa Energy Portal)

The Swiss Export Risk Insurance (SERV) is ready to approve a guarantee for a 250 MW gas power plant in Senegal. The project will be developed by Aksa Energy – a private Turkish company which in 2020 was implicated in a bribery scandal over a gas project in Ghana – and will rely on turbines supplied by GE. It is one of ten gas power plants insured by SERV after Switzerland pledged to no longer support such projects under the Clean Energy Transition Partnership, and the second such project in West Africa within a few months.

According to its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA), the new power plant in Senegal will emit 700,000 tons of CO2 equivalents per year over a life time of 30 years – roughly the emissions produced by 150,000 gasoline-driven cars. Yet the project is not only bad for the climate. It is also more expensive and slower to build than solar alternatives.

The Aksa power plant has already faced significant delays. The developer announced that it began construction in January 2024 and expected power generation to start in 2026. Yet SERV states that final preparations and construction will still take at least another three years. For comparison, Solar World was awarded the contract for a solar farm of 250 MW – the same capacity as the power plant in Senegal – in India in December 2025; this project is scheduled to be completed by mid 2027.

We don’t know the price which Aksa negotiated with Senegal’s power utility for the sale of electricity from its proposed power plant. Yet a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency found that in 2024, 91% of new utility-scale renewable projects were cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives. Solar power specifically was on average 41% cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel.

A solar farm with battery packs in Senegal (photo credit: Africa-Ren)

The Aksa project’s ESIA argues that because solar power is intermittent (i.e., can only be generated during daytime), it needs to be complemented by conventional power sources. Yet this argument ignores that solar power can be stored in batteries, and that Senegal is already developing such battery storage for a wind farm and a solar power plant. Over a project’s lifetime, the average cost of solar power with battery storage is 25 dollars per MWh, compared to 38 dollars for power from a gas project.

“A larger role for renewables would offer a less risky pathway to achieving Senegal’s energy goals, and offer additional benefits”, a USAID report found in 2024. “Renewables may offer a cheaper source of energy than gas even now, particularly if development partners help bring down the cost of capital.”

Meanwhile, consumers are voting solar with their wallets. From Pakistan to Germany, from South Africa to Senegal, millions of households and business owners are buying cheap Chinese solar panels to avoid being dependent on expensive (and in many countries, unreliable) power from the electric grid.

In the 12 months up to June 2025, consumers in Senegal bought Chinese solar panels with a total capacity of no less than 519 MW – twice the capacity of the Aksa gas power plant. Even if they don’t generate power around the clock, these solar panels – imported during a single year! – are able to produce 8% of Senegal’s power generation.

While the cost of gas power is fairly constant, the cost of solar power continues to drop quickly. Whether it is at the household or the utility level, the generation of solar power in Senegal will continue to expand. Yet through the Aksa power project, the country will be locked into buying expensive gas power for 30 years. In Pakistan, the same situation is forcing the public utility into a death spiral, as ever fewer consumers are prepared to buy expensive power from the grid when solar panels and battery storage have become ubiquitous and cheap.

The Senegalese government may be concerned it doesn’t have sufficient expertise to integrate rapidly growing solar capacity and battery storage into the electric grid and needs to complement them with gas power (as the ESIA suggests). If this were the case, the government would commission power plants based on open-cycle gas turbines, which are cheap and flexible and can be used to generate peaking power when the sun doesn’t shine. Yet the Aksa power plant uses combined-cycle gas turbines, which are more efficient but generate baseload power and don’t play well with renewables.

“If the government does successfully implement a large gas-to-power plan”, the 2024 USAID report warned, “it could lock Senegal into using large quantities of gas far into the future when the alternatives would be unequivocally cheaper and more secure.” This is unfortunately the strategy which the Swiss government seems determined to support.

In 2021, Switzerland, along with 34 other countries, committed to the Clean Energy Transition Partnership to cease supporting new international fossil fuel projects from 2023 onward. The majority of signatories are adhering to this agreement – ​​but not Switzerland. Since 2023, the Swiss export risk insurer SERV has pledged its provisional or definitive support for ten gas-fired power plants, including projects in highly repressive countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan. These power plants will emit an estimated 20 million tons of CO₂ equivalents per year – roughly half of Switzerland’s total national emissions.

In an open letter to the Federal Council, 23 Swiss non-governmental organizations are now demanding that Switzerland honor its climate commitments and immediately cease issuing export risk insurance for gas-fired power plants.

The letter was signed by, among others, Alliance Sud, Amnesty International Switzerland, the Climate Alliance, Friends of the Earth Switzerland, Greenpeace Switzerland, KlimaSeniorinnen Switzerland, the Public Eye, the Swiss Energy Foundation, Swiss Church Aid, Swiss Lenten Fund, Swiss Youth for Climate, Swissaid and WWF Switzerland. In it, the NGOs call on the Federal Council, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, and SERV to take the following four measures:

• immediately cease funding fossil fuel projects and instead expand funding for renewable energy projects;

• achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 for all SERV emissions, including those from its projects financed abroad, in accordance with the Swiss Climate and Innovation Act;

• grant the public access to all relevant SERV information;

• and add two members with expertise in foreign, environmental, and climate policy to the SERV board of directors.

Earlier today Campax and the Collectif BreakFree Suisse staged a protest at the SERV headquarter in Zurich, where the board of directors convened for its first meeting of the year. Dozens of protesters presented the two letters to the SERV directors and displayed clocks running late, highlighting the fact that Swiss climate policy is lagging behind the times.

“Switzerland must no longer be among the small group of countries that sabotage international climate policy”, Camille Delgrange, campaigner for BreakFree Suisse, demanded at the protest.

“Promoting international gas projects damages the credibility of Swiss foreign, environmental, and climate policy and delays the necessary transition of the Swiss economy to the age of renewable energies,” added Oliver Daepp, director of the Swiss Climate Protection Association.

In a separate letter to the Federal Council, 17 international NGOs, including Climate Action Network Europe, CounterBalance, Friends of the Earth US, and Oil Change International, supported the demands of the Swiss organizations. “Like all countries, Switzerland should be sensitive to its international reputation,” the NGOs wrote in their letter. “As the seat of numerous international organizations, Switzerland should also appreciate the value of international cooperation, not least to mitigate climate change.”

Photo credit: Caroline Scholl, Campax

Petrostate governments and the fossil fuel industry are currently pushing the construction of massive liquefied gas (LNG) terminals, particularly for export to East Asia and Europe. According to Global Energy Monitor, LNG terminals with 1.6 billion tons of capacity are currently under development, more than the doubling the capacity which is already in operation.

If completed, these terminals will lock societies into dependency from fossil gas for decades to come, with disastrous consequences for the climate. They will also make importing countries vulnerable to political blackmail, be it from the Russian or the US government. But there is good news: The cost of solar, wind and battery storage is dropping so quickly that, as Reuters warns, renewables will “turn [the] LNG glut into a sinkhole”.

Renewables turning the LNG glut into a sinkhole

The energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates that in 2030, electricity from wind and solar, combined with battery storage, will cost USD 50-75 per megawatt hour, while electricity from new gas power plants will cost USD 85-115 per megawatt hour. Pakistan, a country which is rapidly transitioning from fossil fuels to solar power, already had to ask Qatar to redirect 24 cargoes of LNG which it had contracted to other markets.

The insurance industry can play an important role in accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. By refusing to underwrite new coal mines and power plans, insurance companies hastened the shift away from coal. Many insurers also restricted their support for new oil and gas extraction, yet almost all of them continue to underwrite new LNG terminals.

Until very recently, Generali – not a big player in the oil and gas sector – was the only major insurance company which had stopped underwriting new midstream gas projects such as pipelines and LNG terminals. Hannover Re, a large reinsurer, stopped underwriting pipelines transporting gas from new fields in 2022, but not LNG projects.

In January Munich Re, the world’s second biggest reinsurance company, restricted support for new LNG terminals in its revised fossil fuel policy. The relevant language reads as follows:

“Munich Re does not (re)insure contracts exclusively covering the planning, financing, construction or operation of new LNG infrastructure (not yet under construction as at 31 December 2022), if directly and exclusively related to new gas fields as defined above.”

A narrow reading of the restriction would allow Munich Re to continue underwriting LNG projects which are almost completely (but not exclusively) linked to new gas fields. Such an approach would not be a good-faith interpretation of the revised policy however. Munich Re’s policy is good news, and Anna Lena Samborski of the German campaign group Urgewald welcomed it as a “small step in the right direction”.

Munich Re’s revised policy is all the more remarkable in that the company’s most important market is the United States. As Donald Trump has overreached in his assault on international law, science and the environment, it is important that governments and companies from the rest of the world stand up for science-based policies and strengthen their climate commitments.

Other insurers must follow Munich Re’s lead

Munich Re’s new LNG restrictions mark an encouraging start for the company’s new CEO Christoph Jurecka, who took over the reins at the start of the year. Munich Re has warned about an escalating climate crisis since the 1970s and takes pride in its science-bases approach. It has usually not been a first mover in regards to fossil fuel restrictions however, leaving this role to primary insurers like Allianz and reinsurers like Swiss Re.

Allianz has excluded support for new oil and gas extraction and for new midstream oil projects (such as oil pipelines), but not for LNG terminals and other midstream gas projects. Swiss Re excludes support for new oil and gas fields and for companies producing the world’s 10% most carbon-intense oil and gas. Yet under its new CEO Andreas Gerber, the world’s largest reinsurer has so far not adopted any new fossil fuel restrictions, including on LNG. As we need to avoid locking the world into dirty and expensive fossil gas, all eyes are now directed at Allianz and Swiss Re to move next.

Image: Negishi LNG Terminal in Japan, (c) Σ64, Wikimedia Commons

Following the example of convenings in New York, London or Bangkok, the first Climate Week Zurich will take place on May 4-9, 2026. With more than 150 events, the organizers aim to “drive sustainable transformation across business, policy and society”.

Proud platinum sponsor of the event is UBS. “We will support our clients in the transition to a low-carbon world “, the bank says, “and embed considerations of climate change risks and opportunities into our firm for the benefit of our stakeholders, now and in the future”.

I hope Climate Week Zurich will be a success. Yet vague corporate commitments are cheap, and sponsorships which aren’t backed up by action are mere greenwashing. This is certainly the case for UBS. In an environmental scorecard which ShareAction, the British research and advocacy NGO, published in December, the Swiss bank ranks dead-last among the 25 large European banks which were assessed, with a score of only 25 out of 100.

On climate policies more specifically, ShareAction ranks UBS 24th out of 25, ahead of only Deutsche Bank. Scoring only 30 points out of 100, UBS is left in the dust by French banks like BNP Paribas (72) and Crédit Mutuel (71), both of which stopped financing new oil and gas projects years ago.

Lack of red lines on oil and gas

“UBS’ fossil fuel policy ranks last, indicating a lack of red lines to prevent the bank increasing fossil fuel financing in the future”, the new ShareAction report explains. “Unlike many European banks, UBS does not have a policy ruling out financing for new oil & gas projects, or to restrict direct financing for fracking or ultra-deepwater oil & gas.” In particular, UBS doesn’t have any climate targets for its capital market business, i.e. the issuance and underwriting of bonds. Further, ShareAction states, the bank has “yet to commit to phase-out its exposure to coal power and mining”.

The lack of red lines manifests itself in the fossil fuel financing of UBS. As BreakFree Suisse elaborate in a detailed submission, UBS (including Credit Suisse, which it acquired in 2023) offered loans and underwriting to the tune of USD 53 billion to the fossil fuel sector from 2021-2024. And only in recent months, UBS assisted oil giants Chevron and Petrobras in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in new capital.

In response to pressure from the US government, UBS along with many other banks left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance last year – and didn’t stop there: The Swiss bank also delayed its target to reach net-zero emissions across its own operations by ten years, and disconnected the compensation of its executives from the achievement of ESG targets.

What is to be done?

Based on its analysis, ShareAction recommends that UBS “rule out direct financing of new oil & gas projects, as well as new pipelines” and LNG infrastructure. It also asks the bank to “establish restrictions on companies expanding oil & gas exploration, production, pipelines, and liquefaction”.

UBS and other banks should indeed adopt policies to rule out support for fossil fuel expansion and to align their business strategies with climate goals more broadly. Yet recent experience suggests that corporate commitments that have been made under public pressure can always be rolled back.

The backsliding by UBS and other banks demonstrates that we need binding legal norms which rule out support for new fossil fuel projects and align business strategies with global environmental standards. This is the goal of the popular initiative on the Swiss financial center, for which a wide coalition of civil society groups is currently collecting signatures.

In the meantime, Climate Week Zurich would be well advised to reconsider their sponsorship criteria.

(Photo Greenpeace Switzerland)

As we reported here in September, four residents of the Indonesian island of Pari who are severely affected by climate change, brought a climate lawsuit against Swiss cement producer Holcim in February 2023. They are seeking compensation for the damages they are suffering to the extent of Holcim’s responsibility and demand that the company reduce its future emissions to a climate-compatible level.

Holcim is the world’s largest cement company and responsible for 0.4% of global historical CO2 emissions. The Indonesian case is the first climate lawsuit against a Swiss corporation and a cement company.

Holcim requested that the civil court of Zug, where it is headquartered, dismiss the Indonesian lawsuit right away. The plaintiffs and the NGOs behind them, according to the court’s summary of Holcim’s position, are “ in reality not concerned with defending against a violation of personal rights, but rather with forcing a political decision on greenhouse gas emissions and/or climate protection measures. The civil courts lack jurisdiction in this matter.”

Yesterday, we learned that the court in Zug rejected Holcim’s claim in its entirety and ruled that the lawsuit should be admitted. It is worthwhile to quote some passages from the court’s 52-page decision verbatim:

“While climate change undoubtedly has a political dimension, as it affects a wide range of public interests beyond individual concerns,” the court states, “the private interests of the plaintiffs are not so overshadowed by the political scope of climate change that a civil court review would be precluded.”

“Even if the lawsuit affects the interests of third parties, for example, because they generally support a reduction in greenhouse gases or are affected to a similar extent as the plaintiffs, the plaintiffs’ own interest carries sufficient weight in this case to justify the litigation.”

An important clarification: “The fact that a company is not solely responsible for climate change and that the reduction of greenhouse gases by a single actor may not have an immediately noticeable impact on global climate consequences does not absolve the defendant (…) of its individual responsibility to contribute to combating climate change to the best of its ability.”

“Furthermore,” the court continued, “the defendant’s argument that other actors in the cement industry would emit more greenhouse gases in its place if obligated to reduce emissions is also unconvincing. If the lawsuit is successful, other CO2 emitters would likely also have to expect to be held accountable for their emissions.” (…) Moreover, harmful behavior is not legitimate simply because others behave in the same way.” Refreshing clarity from the Zug’s civil court!

The recent decision is an interim ruling. Holcim has already announced its intention to appeal the decision to the Zug High Court. If the High Court upholds the decision, the lawsuit from Indonesia will then receive a substantive trial.

Although the Zug decision represents only a successful first step, it has significant implications as a precedent. Sébastien Duyck, a Human Rights & Climate Campaign Manager at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) in Geneva, notes:

“By accepting the case as admissible, judges confirmed that the law applies to climate harms and rejected all arguments aimed at shielding major polluters from accountability. Building on recent case law, the decision confirms that the civil liability of major emitters can be engaged for climate harms they have knowingly contributed to. (...) The decision of the Swiss tribunal provides one additional precedent that will make it easier for other judges to hear such cases.”

“We are very pleased”, Ibu Asmania, one of the plaintiffs from Indonesia, said according to Swiss Interchurch Aid. “This decision gives us the strength to continue our fight.” With its important interim ruling, the court in Zug is indeed sending a very encouraging message at the end of the year.

(Image: Swiss Interchurch Aid)

[English version below]

Als reiches Land mit führenden Klimafachleuten wäre die Schweiz prädestiniert, eine aktive Rolle beim Ausstieg aus den fossilen Brennstoffen zu spielen. Dennoch ist ihre Klimapolitik oft zaghaft, kurzsichtig und zynisch.

Seit dem September 2024 erkunde ich mit meinem Blog, Swiss Climate Rambles, die Höhen und Tiefen der schweizerischen Klimapolitik. Neu werde ich diese Beiträge auch auf deutsch auf der Plattform Schweizer Klimawanderungen veröffentlichen. Einige frühere Beiträge habe ich dort bereits übersetzt. Zukünftige Beiträge werden gleichzeitig mit der englischen Version erscheinen.

Wer in deutscher Sprache mitwandern will, kann sich hier gerne für die Klimawanderungen registrieren. Das englischsprachige Abonnement ist davon nicht betroffen. Vielen Dank für euer Interesse.

Swiss Climate Rambles now also in German

Since September 2024, I have explored the peaks and abysses of Swiss climate policies in my blog, Swiss Climate Rambles. Going forward I will also publish these blog posts in German on the platform, Schweizer Klimawanderungen. Feel free to subscribe there if you would like to join these German-language rambles. Your English-language subscription will not be affected.

Thank you for your interest.

At the recent climate COP in Belém, governments negotiated to prepare a global roadmap for the exit from coal, oil and gas. The plan failed because countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and India blocked it. The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, which led the Swiss delegation, supported the global exit from fossil fuels and called out Saudi Arabia and other countries for opposing the roadmap in a public statement.

At the very same time, the Swiss Export Risk Insurance SERV quietly worked to support the expansion of the fossil fuel sector in Saudi Arabia. Thumbing its nose at the Swiss climate diplomats, SERV just announced its intention to support a massive gas power plant of 3,010 megawatt in the country. (For comparison, Switzerland’s largest power facility, the Leibstadt nuclear power plant, has a capacity of 1,285 megawatt.)

The Saudi Arabia project follows within weeks of SERV support for other new gas power projects in Côte d’Ivoire and Poland. In total, SERV has given preliminary or final approval to 10 new gas power plants around the world since the start of 2023. This is the period for which Switzerland – represented by its climate diplomats – pledged to no longer offer any support for new international fossil fuel projects under the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP) at the Glasgow COP.

The 10 new projects in SERV’s gas power fleet have a total capacity of 8,900 megawatt. Even if the emissions from extracting and transporting gas are neglected, these power plants will emit an estimated 20 million tons of CO2 equivalents every year. (CO2 equivalents cover CO2 but also other greenhouse gases such as methane.)

SERV projects add more emissions than the rest of Switzerland is reducing

Under its revised CO2 law, which entered into effect this year, Switzerland must cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half between 1990 and 2030. The country reduced its emissions from 55 million to 41 million tons of CO2e between 1990 and 2023, and must reduce them by another 13 million tons by 2030.

Many Swiss people and companies work diligently to reduce their carbon footprint. Yet the annual emissions from gas power projects which SERV approved during the last three years alone will be much higher than the reductions which Switzerland aims to achieve under its CO2 law between 2023 and 2030.

Ironically, the Swiss government plans to achieve a growing share of emission reductions by financing green projects overseas. Studies have demonstrated that such projects are hardly ever effective because their emission reductions would have happened even without Swiss support or cannot be sustained. In contrast, the additional emissions which Swiss export credits facilitate overseas are very real, but are ignored under the Swiss CO2 law.

Legal, political and moral responsibility

Switzerland’s pledge under the CETP is not legally binding and when SERV is boosting the expansion of fossil fuels, it may well be operating within the letter of the law. Yet SERV and the bodies which control it not only have a legal responsibility. They are failing in their political and moral responsibility to address the biggest crisis of the 21^st century.

These bodies include SERV’s board of directors, chaired by Barbara Hayoz, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, led by Secretary of State Helene Budliger Artieda, and ultimately the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, led by Federal Councillor Guy Parmelin. They are causing significant damage to the climate and to Switzerland’s reputation.

“We need to hold fossil fuel companies and their enablers to account”, UN Secretary General António Guterres said in September 2022. “That includes the banks and other financiers that continue to invest and underwrite carbon pollution.”

This blog post makes a small contribution to hold leading Swiss fossil fuel enablers to account. We should remember their names while we keep up efforts to reduce the Swiss carbon footprint and advocate for climate action. “History is coming for the planet-wreckers, the fossil fuel barons and their enablers, profiting from destruction”, António Guterres also said, in May 2023. “Together, the rest of us can write a different story.”

(This blog post has also been published in German language.)

At COP30, which is currently taking place in Belém/Brazil, the Swiss government is supporting the “tripling of renewable energy by 2030, as well as a global phase-out of coal, oil, and gas by 2050”. As it has done before, Switzerland’s export credit agency SERV is undermining this position by supporting yet another new gas project.

As we reported three weeks ago, SERV has given preliminary or final approval to 10 gas power projects since 2023, in spite of the Swiss government’s commitment four years ago that it would end all such support after 2022.

On October 22, SERV indicated its intention to support the 372 MW Songon gas power plant in Côte d’Ivoire. Two weeks later, a senior representative of Calik Enerji, a Turkish construction company, announced on LinkedIn that his company had secured a SERV guarantee for building the Kozienice power plant, a massive, 1’336 MW gas project in Poland. SERV has meanwhile confirmed this information.

Poland is the most coal-dependent country of the EU. Calik Enerji argues that “the Kozienice project will play a key role in Poland’s coal-to-gas transition, reducing national CO₂ emissions and preparing for future hydrogen integration”. This argument is spurious for two reasons:

First, Poland imports gas mainly in liquefied form, and the greenhouse gas emissions released during the extraction, processing, transportation and storage of LNG are so high that its climate impacts can be even bigger than the impacts of coal. SERV assessed the climate impacts of the Kozienice project, but refuses to disclose its assessment to the public.

Maybe more importantly, Poland is rapidly moving away from coal indeed – but primarily towards renewables, not fossil gas. In the past 10 years, the capacity of gas power plants in Poland increased by 4.2 GW, while the country’s renewable capacity increased by 26.8 GW. Coal still generated 56% of Poland’s electricity in 2024, while renewable sources generated 29% and gas, 12%. Yet growing quickly, Poland’s renewable energy sources in June 2025 for the first time generated more electricity than coal.

In Poland, electric utilities can bid for subsidized power supply contracts in so called capacity market auctions, and gas projects would not be viable without such subsidies. Because solar power combined with battery storage is cheaper than gas power, ENEA, the utility developing the Kozienice project, for years failed to place a power supply contract and attract a developer for the power plant.

ENEA only managed to secure a power supply contract once the government, which prefers dealing with large fossil fuel utilities rather than with decentralized renewable producers, excluded battery storage from competing for the contracts. Kozienice will saddle a country moving towards renewables with expensive, unnecessary and dirty gas power for decades.

In July 2025, ENEA finally signed a contract with Calik Enerji to develop the new gas power plant through direct negotiations rather than a public tender. Such no-tender contracts may open the door to corruption and are discouraged by the Swiss authorities. SERV requires its customers to sign an anti-corruption declaration, but does not require public tender processes.

While most other export credit agencies are moving away from fossil fuels, Switzerland’s SERV is positioning itself as the European go-to source of export finance for gas projects. This undermines the transition to renewable energy sources in countries like Poland as well as the credibility of Swiss foreign and climate policies.

SERV is hoping that the law governing it will be revised, and the Swiss government has announced such a revision for next year. SERV hopes that this revision will allow it to operate more flexibly, and will “improve the access of Swiss exporters to large international projects”. Through its all-out support for fossil gas projects SERV risks destroying the broad political support it will need for this revision to move forward.

Image: existing coal power plant at Kozienice

Avoiding climate breakdown requires a shift away from fossil fuels and a rapid expansion of clean power generation. A new report finds that the Swiss Export Risk Insurance SERV, the country’s official export credit agency, fails on both accounts.

Under the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP), which was signed four years ago at the climate COP in Glasgow, Switzerland and 39 other actors committed to end international public finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022 and prioritize finance for clean energy instead. A new report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth U.S. concludes that governments have largely followed through on their agreement.

The report finds that in 2024, overseas fossil fuel financing from the signatories of the CETP decreased by up to USD 16.3 billion (or 78%), compared with the annual average of the 2019–2021 period. At the same time, the CETP signatories committed USD 2.8 billion more in financing for clean energy projects than in the previous period. (Precise figures for international fossil fuel finance are lacking because Canada’s export credit agency doesn’t distinguish between projects financed abroad and at home.)

While 10 out of 17 high-income signatories have fully aligned their energy finance policies with the CETP pledge, a few governments are undermining their progress. Switzerland stands out in that it is violating its commitment under the Glasgow partnership on multiple accounts:

SERV continues to support new gas power projects, and just last week disclosed its intention to support the 372 MW Songon gas power plant in Côte d’Ivoire. Songon will emit more than 1,100,000 tons of CO2 every year, and according to a methodology used by the Swiss government, will cause annual climate costs of CHF 478 million (or USD 602 million).

The International Renewable Energy Agency found in July 2025 that 91% of new wind and solar projects are now cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative. This will be even more true by 2028, when construction of the Songon project is expected to be completed, and in a country well suited for solar power (combined with battery storage) such as Côte d’Ivoire. Yet the Environmental Impact Assessment for the Songon project does not analyze potential alternatives.

Assuming SERV confirms its support, Songon is not the first project which violates Switzerland’s pledge under the CETP. As we reported on this blog last year, the agency supported six new gas power plants in 2023 and 2024, after the Glasgow partnership entered into effect. In addition, SERV gave in-principle approval (but at this point, no final go-ahead) to four new gas projects, including Songon and a new gas power plant in Senegal. Switzerland, along with Italy, the United States and Germany, is one of the four countries which have approved massive new fossil fuel financing since the CETP entered into force.

Switzerland is not only failing the CETP test in regard to specific projects. It is also the only CETP signatory which has explicitly weakened its fossil fuel policy. In March 2023, SERV pledged to end all its fossil fuel finance, with exemptions only for projects in line with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal. In July 2024, Oil Change International revealed that the agency had quietly watered down its policy by allowing SERV to fund any gas project it considers is in the “economic, foreign, trade and development policy interests of Switzerland”.

Finally, SERV hasn’t increased its support for clean energy projects during the CETP period. It supported clean energy exports of a very modest USD 4 million per year during the 2019-21 period and none at all in 2024. (The agency did support exports of CHF 99 million for a wind power project in Kosovo in May 2025 – a small fraction of the gas projects it is supporting.) Even though a stated objective of its climate strategy is to “maximise sustainable exports”, SERV doesn’t currently offer any specific incentives for the export of clean energy equipment.

Climate hypocrisy is not just a problem of SERV, but of the Swiss government at large. The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), which oversees the strategies of the Swiss export insurer, states in its Approach to Climate Change: “Addressing the climate crisis requires a comprehensive reorientation of public and private financial flows, away from fossil fuels, towards green and sustainable sectors.” This is very well said – except that SECO only seems to direct its advice at other governments, not at Switzerland’s own export promotion.

Image: A SERV-supported gas power plant in Vietnam

Even though it is not widely known, Chubb is the world’s second-biggest commercial non-life insurer. According to the WokeChubb campaign, which was recently launched by a right-wing pressure group in the US, Chubb is also a primary example of a company which has lost its way to woke ideology.

Among other things, the WokeChubb campaigners are getting worked up about the following statement from Chubb’s CEO Evan Greenberg:

“Chubb recognizes the reality of climate change and the substantial impact of human activity on our planet. Making the transition to a low-carbon economy involves planning and action by policymakers, investors, businesses and citizens alike. The policy we are implementing today reflects Chubb’s commitment to do our part as a steward of the Earth.”

Wait what? An insurance company, which is supposed to base its business decisions on sound science, recognizes the reality of climate change? What’s next on this slippery slope? Will Chubb recognize the reality of evolution? Argue that the Earth is revolving around the sun?

It would be funny if it weren’t so outrageous. Consumers’ Research, the group behind the new campaign, is not a bunch of confused Flat Earthers. They are primarily financed through dark-money funders such as the Donors Trust. The fossil fuel industry has a long history of financing anti-woke campaigns through dark money channels as a smokescreen for their narrow interests.

Consumers’ Research criticizes Chubb for, among other things, “refus[ing] to insure American energy companies”, “managing environmental risk” and “supporting environmental resiliency projects throughout the world”. According to Fox News, the group plans to target Chubb with a million-dollar ad campaign and has sent letters to the US Justice and Treasury Departments claiming that the insurer’s policies are inconsistent with the Trump agenda.

Chubb, which is registered in Zurich but for all practical purposes a US company, adopted a policy to stop insuring new coal projects in 2019 – a position which it shares with 45 other insurers at this point, including most major global insurance companies. In the latest scorecard of the Insure Our Future campaign, Chubb scored 1.2 out of a possible 10 points for its fossil fuel insurance policies and ranked 18th out of 30 global insurers. Chubb has in other words taken some basic steps but is by no means a climate leader in the industry.

In July 2025, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that Chubb reneged on its previous commitments and insured the Nghi Son 2 power plant in Vietnam, a new 1,200 megawatt project entirely powered by coal. The WokeChubb campaign demonstrates that even abandoning its climate commitments didn’t protect Chubb from the ideological zeal of the MAGA movement and the calculus of its fossil fuel industry backers.

The WokeChubb campaign is not an isolated effort. Consumers’ Research has targeted other big financial firms with very modest climate credentials such as BlackRock, and 23 Republican attorneys general recently threatened to go after the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for its standard for financial institutions. In many cases, the targeted banks and insurers decided to cave in to such pressure.

As fossil fuel finance campaigners we have always saluted insurance companies, including Chubb, when they have done the right thing. We have also made clear how far they still have to go, and have called them out for violating their climate commitments.

At this point, even giving in to pressure will not satisfy the feeding frenzy of the MAGA movement and its fossil fuel backers. Recognizing the reality of climate change and taking climate action are immensely popular positions throughout the world. Banks and insurance companies may come to regret if they abandon such basic principles now. After all, as my colleague Nora Scheel of Campax has put it so well, “those who give in without resistance share responsibility for what follows”.

When we were fighting destructive dam, coal and nuclear power projects in the 1980s and 90s, we referred to wind and solar power as “alternative energy”. They were the fairtrade stores of the energy sector: benign but expensive, and unable to compete with cheap coal, oil and gas.

In the last few years, the tables have turned. As Bill McKibben, the godfather of the US climate movement, demonstrates in his inspiring new book, Here Comes the Sun, solar power has been growing faster than any other power source in history.

In 2009, the International Energy Agency predicted that we would install 244 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2030. The world hit this target in 2015 – within six rather than 21 years. Greenpeace was the most optimistic voice at the time, projecting that we would install 921 gigawatt by 2030. The world hit this target in 2022, and current capacity stands at more than 2,000 gigawatt.

Pakistan may be the most impressive example of the silent revolution which is currently reshaping the power sector. Chinese solar panels and batteries have become so cheap that farmers, businesses and home owners installed the equivalent of all the country's conventional power plants on rooftops and in fields in the past five to six year – at an accelerating pace.

A new report by the think-tank Ember suggests that the solar revolution is now also picking up in Africa. The cost of solar panels has dropped so much that by replacing diesel, such panels can pay for themselves within six months. Compared with 2023/24, African imports of Chinese solar panels increased by 60% in 2024/25. In Algeria, imports grew 33-fold during this period, in Zambia, eight-fold and in Botswana, seven-fold.

Solar power is quickly expanding in industrialized countries as well. Even under Trump, solar power accounted for 87% of all new power capacity added in the US in the first four months of 2025 (and wind, for another 9%). In Australia, one third of all homes have now installed rooftop solar panels. In Germany, solar power generated some 17% of the country’s electricity last year and renewable energy overall, a full 63%. No less than 1.5 million German households have installed solar panels on their balconies, saving up to 30% of a typical electricity bill.

Due to ever changing regulations and incentives, solar power has grown more slowly in Switzerland. Even so, it covered some 10% of the country’s electricity consumption in 2024 and is projected to cover 14% in 2025. An additional boost is expected once the incentives in a new Electricity Act which passed in 2024 take full effect.

The solar revolution can change everything

As Bill McKibben notes, the silent solar revolution has the potential to change everything. It has started to dent the use of fossil fuels, both planned and current. None of the 15 coal power plants which South American governments planned to build ten years ago are still in the pipeline. Coal and gas power plants in Pakistan are being idled as consumers turn to solar power. Thanks to the growth of wind and solar, emissions from the Chinese power sector fell by 6% in the first quarter of this year. Emissions from the German power sector fell by half from 2015 to 2024.

Just as importantly, the falling price of solar panels allows communities in the global South to access electricity who have so far not been connected to the electric grid or are affected by regular power outages. The example of Pakistan shows that poor countries can now leapfrog fossil fuel based power sector development and move forward with renewable energy sources and battery power.

Distributed solar power makes consumers and the energy system more resilient to shocks. Expanding solar power has made the Ukrainian power sector less vulnerable to Russian attacks. When wildfires shut down electricity supply in much of Los Angeles, solar-powered homes served as hubs where neighbors could still charge their cell phones and access other services.

From the local to the global level, the solar revolution helps to decentralize and democratize the power sector. Unlike large power plants, the solar expansion in Pakistan or Africa has not been planned, funded and controlled by governments or international financial institutions, but driven from the bottom up. The rapid growth of solar power also shifts economic and political power away from petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States. It’s no wonder that the fossil fuel lobbies are currently fighting it tooth and nail.

“Our local star already provides us with warmth and light and photosynthesis, and now it would like to give us all the power we need”, Bill McKibben has marveled. Like all rapid change, the solar revolution will create challenges and problems along the way. For now, we should just celebrate the amazing breakthrough of this “energy from heaven, not from hell”.

Responding to the climate crisis and public pressure, thousands of companies have adopted net-zero emission targets and other climate commitments. While some of them are undertaking good-faith efforts, others simply try to greenwash their reputation or stave off government regulations.

In 2015 the World Resources Institute, WWF and other well-established NGOs launched the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as an effort to develop emission reduction targets in line with climate science and the goals of the Paris Agreement. The SBTi has prepared standards for numerous business sectors – including for financial institutions – and validates corporate targets based on these standards, to separate the wheat from the corporate chaff.

If companies make commitments under the initiative but fail to properly follow up, the SBTi can remove them from its list. It has done so in hundreds of cases, including with prominent companies such as Amazon or Walmart.

In the past 10 years, about 11,500 companies have made commitments under the SBTi, and almost 9,000 of them have set emission reduction targets which were validated by the initiative. The companies which have validated targets or at least made commitments under the SBTi account for more than 40% of the global market capitalization.

SBTi standards contain important gaps, but the initiative is the only recognized effort to independently set and validate corporate climate targets. The Wall Street Journal called it “the gold standard setter for corporate climate action”, and countless investors rely on its validation for taking investment decisions.

In 2019 Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance company, was among the first 87 corporations which committed to set climate targets under the SBTi. As the only major global reinsurer, Swiss Re continued to be closely involved in the initiative. The company’s latest Climate Transition Plan for example defines its emission reduction targets with reference to the SBTi standards. Under the Plan, the reinsurer also commits to “engage in transition-related industry-led and global initiatives” (such as presumably the SBTi).

Swiss Re is aware that the global transition away from fossil fuels depends on credible independent validators. Under the oil and gas policy which it adopted in 2022, the company committed to end, by 2030, all (re)insurance services for oil and gas producers which are not on a credible transition path “as per SBTi or a comparable, credible third-party assessment”. Neither Swiss Re nor any other underwriters or investors could do such assessments on their own.

It is all the more disappointing that two years after exiting the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, and only six month after committing to the process in its latest transition plan, Swiss Re announced last week that it will no longer let the SBTi validate its climate targets. In August, the attorneys general of 23 red states in the US had written to the SBTi, expressing concern about its finance sector standard as part of their fight to suppress climate science. Swiss Re derives 40% of its revenue from the US market.

Swiss Re assured interested audiences that even outside the SBTi, its climate strategy “remains unchanged”. WWF Switzerland said in a comment that it would “closely monitor whether re-insurance companies truly stay on course to meet their net-zero commitments”. Yet without independent validation by the SBTi, this becomes more difficult to do.

The sudden departure from the SBTi raises questions whether Andreas Berger, who took over as Swiss Re’s CEO in July 2024, will continue to position the reinsurer as a global climate leader. NGOs will measure the company’s climate commitments by its actions – for example on shifting its treaty business away from fossil fuels – and not by media statements.

Swiss Re’s departure from the SBTi – and the lacking engagement of the reinsurance industry in the initiative more broadly – demonstrate the limits of voluntary climate commitments. In the face of the escalating climate crisis, we cannot allow climate action to depend on how industry leaders respond to shifting political circumstances. Stricter government regulation is needed.

In Switzerland, a new popular initiative (“Finanzplatz-Initiative”) demands that Swiss financial institutions align their international business activities with globally agreed climate and biodiversity goals, for example by ending their support for new fossil fuel extraction. If Swiss voters approve the initiative, a new government agency will review its implementation. By withdrawing from the gold standard for corporate climate targets, Swiss Re has just made a strong case for the new initiative.

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“I feel the effects of climate change every day” Ibu Asmania from the Indonesian island of Pari told a cantonal court in Zug, Switzerland, today. “I am afraid for our future and the future of our children. Where shall we go if our island sinks?”

Whether it’s typhoons or floods, heat waves or droughts, people like Ibu Asmania, who have contributed least to climate change, are suffering the most: poor farmers, fisherfolk, and more generally poor people in the global South.

According to a recent study by the Loss and Damage Collaboration, an NGO network, climate damages in the developing world amount to about $400 billion per year and will continue to increase. No effective mechanism currently exists to hold the actors which have done most to cause these damages to account for addressing them.

After years of negotiations, governments in 2022 agreed to set up to a loss and damage fund to help cover climate damages in poor countries. Since then governments have completely failed to properly fund this mechanism. By April 2025, 27 countries and regions contributed a paltry $321 million, and the fund is expected to disburse only $250 million by the end of 2026 – about 50 cents for every 1,000 dollars in climate damages. Rich Switzerland has not committed any contributions to the fund.

Given the refusal of the responsible parties to address the cost of climate damages, it is all the more important to explore and strengthen legal avenues so impacted people can find redress. Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law is maintaining a database of close to 4,000 climate lawsuits (in the widest sense), including several hundred cases seeking compensation for damages, mitigation and adaptation costs from fossil fuel and other companies.

A pioneering lawsuit

Pulau Pari is a small island with a population of 1,400 in Indonesia. The island has already lost 11% of its area to sea level rise and is suffering from frequent flooding, including just last night. So far, the local people have been left to cover their economic losses and the cost of protective measures all by themselves.

(Flooding in Pari)

After efforts to reach an amiable solution failed, Ibu Asmania, Arif Pujianto, Pak Bobby and Edi Mulyono, four impacted Pari islanders, in February 2023 filed a lawsuit in the Swiss canton of Zug requesting compensation for their damages from Swiss cement giant Holcim.

Accounting for 7% of global emissions concrete, of which cement is the main ingredient, is one the biggest sources of CO2 emissions. Based in Zug, Holcim is the world’s biggest cement producer. According to the Climate Accountability Institute, Holcim is responsible for about 0.42% of all historical global industrial emissions. The University of Massachusetts’ 2024 greenhouse polluters index ranks the company 45th among all global emitters (and first among Swiss emitters).

The Indonesian plaintiffs ask that Holcim pay 0.42% of the costs of their climate damages and adaptation measures – the proportion of climate damages it is responsible for. The plaintiffs also want the company to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030 and 69% by 2040 to reduce further damages. Their lawsuit is the first effort trying to hold a cement company to account for its role in fueling climate change, and the first case seeking damages from a Swiss company. The plaintiffs are supported by the Call for Climate Justice.

Today’s court proceedings

Since Holcim tries to avoid a substantive discussion of its role, the cantonal court in Zug, where the company is headquartered, only focused on the question of whether the case was admissible today. A lawyer for Holcim claimed that the company “deeply regrets” that the plaintiffs will lose their home, yet he argued that climate action was a political issue which could and should not be decided by the courts.

If the Holcim case was admitted, the lawyer asserted, this could result in a sort of legal free-for-all where everyone could sue everyone else. In a show of utter arrogance, he proceeded to offer the plaintiffs some coins from his own pocket to demonstrate how negligible their demands for compensation were from a Swiss perspective.

The lawyer for the Indonesian plaintiffs pointed out that Holcim’s global historical emissions were more than twice as high as the emissions of all of Switzerland, so the company was certainly a relevant target. Ruling out a legal responsibility of carbon majors for their emissions would certainly be convenient for these corporations, but not legally tenable. As she noted, courts in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and New Zealand have already ruled that similar claims for climate compensation where legally admissible.

Zug’s cantonal court will communicate in writing whether it considers the Indonesian case admissible and people impacted by climate change can seek climate justice also in the Swiss legal system.

(Large public interest in today’s court proceedings)

Photo credits for images 1 and 2: HEKS (Swiss Interchurch Aid)

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Insurance companies which adopted coal restrictions significantly reduced the number of coal mines and the amount of coal which they insured in the United States, thus contributing to the shift away from coal. This is the main finding of a new working paper which three researchers at the University of Zurich published last week (*).

The Insure Our Future campaign has pressured the insurance industry to shift away from coal and other fossil fuels since 2017. We have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that the restrictions which insurers adopted during this period have created bottlenecks for coal companies and made it impossible to build new coal power plants in much of the world. Through freedom of information requests, the Zurich researchers managed to access 9,745 insurance policies across 456 mines during the 2014-2024 period, covering more than three quarters of US coal production. Based on this data, they can for the first time offer hard evidence on the impact of insurers’ coal restrictions.

Compared with other insurance companies, the researchers show, insurers with coal restrictions reduced the number of insured coal mines by 16% and the volume of insured coal by 56%. Mines which relied on cover from insurers with coal restrictions were more likely to be abandoned than other mines. The tighter their restrictions are, the more likely the insurers were to end their coverage for coal mines.

These findings are all the more remarkable since most insurance companies only rule out support for new coal projects, not for the ongoing coal production which the new paper analyzes. By the end of 2019 for example, 13 of the 30 insurers analyzed in the Insure Our Future scorecard had adopted coal restrictions, but only three of them restricted cover for existing coal production in some way.

This suggests that once they adopted coal restrictions, many insurers started withdrawing from the sector beyond the narrow scope of their exclusions. We can assume that the impact of their restrictions on the development of new coal projects, which wasn’t analyzed in the paper (and is mostly happening outside the US), is even more significant.

The new paper identifies two exceptions from the positive overall trend. Lloyd’s, whose restrictions on coal were not mandatory, increased both the coal output and the number of mines it underwrote. And Zurich, which adopted coal exclusions in late 2017, kept the amount of coal it insured stable for five years and increased the number of US coal mines significantly from the end of 2019. It appears that Lloyd’s and Zurich took over mines which Chubb – and for a period, AIG – stopped insuring after they adopted coal restrictions.

Zurich is a leading insurer of workers compensation in the US, which benefits employees and which the Insure Our Future campaign does not oppose. Yet in 2023, Zurich had a market share of 4.8% in US workers compensation but according to the new data, insured 13.8% of the coal mines in the US. And the authors of the new paper found that Zurich took on more than three quarters of the coal mines which AIG dropped in late 2019. It is unlikely that workers compensation accounted for most of this sudden increase.

In June 2019, Zurich pledged to no longer insure companies which “generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining thermal coal, or produce more than 20 million tons of thermal coal per year” after two years of engagement. Since we don’t know which coal companies the insurer took on, we can’t tell whether it violated its own policy. Either way Zurich’s continued or even expanded support for coal is not consistent with its public commitment to the clean energy transition.

Overall however the trend is positive. “[T]he results suggest that reductions in insurance coverage can meaningfully constrain coal mining activity”, the researchers conclude. Insurance companies should use their clout to accelerate not just the shift away from coal, but also from oil and gas.

Photo credit: Bureau of Land Management

(*) Carradori, Olimpia, von Meyerinck, Felix and Sautner, Zacharias, Insurers' Carbon Underwriting Policies (June 25, 2025). European Corporate Governance Institute – Finance Working Paper No. 1071/2025, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper No. 25-58

Today, a massive avalanche of rock and ice destroyed much of Blatten, a beautiful village in Switzerland’s secluded Loetschen Valley whose inhabitants were evacuated a few days ago. Last summer, massive chunks of rock broke off the Matterhorn and Eiger, Switzerland’s most iconic mountains, within days. And in 2017, a large mudslide destroyed parts of Bondo in the Bregaglia Valley, killing eight people in the process.

Landslides are a recurrent feature in the Swiss Alps, and it is too early to assess the exact reasons for the catastrophic rockslide which destroyed Blatten today. Yet we know that as average temperatures rise, thawing permafrost makes such incidents both more frequent and more threatening.

Permafrost is ground material that remains frozen throughout the year. It underlies an estimated 6,000 square kilometers of land in the Alps, an area three times bigger than all Alpine glaciers taken together. This includes some 2,000 square kilometers of permafrost in Switzerland (or about 5% of the Swiss land area), mostly slopes located at an altitude of 2500 meters and higher. As permafrost thaws and freezes again, the ground can lose its stability and trigger landslides through a variety of factors.

Blatten and Bondo are small towns in remote valleys. Yet thawing permafrost also puts major population centers and tourist destinations such as St. Moritz, Zermatt, Wengen, Andermatt and Verbier at risk and threatens important Alpine infrastructure such as the Great St. Bernard, Julier and Bernina passes.

Melting permafrost has contributed to rock and mudslide disasters which claimed hundreds of lives in the Kaukasus and the Himalayas. In Switzerland, the toll of such events has so far mainly been emotional and financial. The wall which is supposed to protect Bondo from future landslides has for example just been completed at a cost of more than 50 million Swiss francs (or more than 60 million US dollars).

Yet the erosion and landslides which affected Blatten and Bondo, the Matterhorn and Eiger, are early examples of a trend which will only get worse. Near Mont Blanc, narrow peaks below 3,850 meters above sea level “may lose permafrost entirely” by the end of the 21st century, the IPCC has found.

Today the Swiss government said that the inhabitants of Blatten should be able to stay in their valley. Yet Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the newspaper of the Swiss bourgeoisie, has argued that Swiss society should “give up certain mountain valleys” in response to thawing permafrost, increasing floods and mudslides. “In economic terms we cannot justify keeping these places alive if it becomes more expensive due to the looming climate damages”, adds a representative of Avenir Suisse, the think-tank of the Swiss business sector.

If we allow climate change to continue escalating, certain areas, including Swiss mountain valleys, may indeed become uninhabitable. But this recognition should shock us out of our complacency. No place on Earth will be safe from runaway climate change. If we have to give up our homes and culture to global warming, it is all the more important that we do the utmost possible to stop the crisis from getting worse.

The Swiss government is doing the opposite. With vocal support from the Swiss business lobby it ignored a climate ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, cut the budget for climate action, decided to shift freight transport from railways back to trucks, and relaxed climate restrictions on the automobile industry in recent months. In a sad irony, the Swiss government even decided not to participate in the EU’s Copernicus program, an effort which would allow the comprehensive monitoring of climate risks also in Switzerland. Sacrificing mountain valleys while continuing to fuel climate change is short-sighted and cynical.

Copyright: 20 Minuten (Blatten), Wikimedia commons (Matterhorn), jungfrau.ch (Eiger)