Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA)
Coalition of insurers and reinsurers committed to net zero underwriting portfolios, sharply reduced after antitrust pressure in 2023.
The Net Zero Insurance Alliance was a coalition of insurers and reinsurers created in 2021 under United Nations auspices, committed to aligning their underwriting portfolios with a net zero trajectory by 2050. It was the insurance counterpart of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. In 2023 the alliance suffered a collapse in membership after letters from US lawmakers alleging an anticompetitive collusion risk, with several major members withdrawing to avoid legal exposure. The initiative was restructured into a less binding forum. This episode illustrates the collision between competition law and coordinated climate action in the financial sector, and the legal fragility of collective exclusion commitments. For specialty underwriting it pushed each insurer back to an individual trajectory rather than a shared market discipline.
After most of its members left in spring 2023, the UN's environment agency, UNEP, discontinued the alliance on April 25, 2024 and created in its place the Forum for Insurance Transition to Net Zero, a dialogue without collective commitments that brought together 46 members, including 19 insurers and reinsurers, 16 regulatory and supervisory authorities and 11 academic institutions and civil society organizations.
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