LONDON- Companies, insurers and governments need to work together to help businesses cope with major risks such as climate change and cyber security, company executives said on Tuesday.
"Public-private partnerships are the only way to tackle climate risk," insurance broker Willis Towers Watson CEO John Haley said at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
Zurich Insurance CEO Mario Greco said insurers did not have the capacity to tackle climate and cyber risks alone, but neither should such problems be outsourced wholly to governments.
Governments and insurers in Europe and the United States are considering state-backed reinsurance programmes for future pandemics, though some insurance sources have said progress has been slow, as governments focus their attention on dealing with the current crisis.
But Lloyd's of London and others have called for a broader-based strategy to tackle a range of "black swan" events such as climate risk and cyber attacks.
Haley said risk managers had been underprepared for COVID-19.
"Like anybody else, we didn’t predict the pandemic and the kind of consequences that would have," he said.
"That reinforces the need for continually rethinking and testing your assumptions about resilience."
(Reporting by Carolyn Cohn Editing by Rachel Armstrong) ((carolyn.cohn@thomsonreuters.com; 44 207 513 4391;))
