Environmental awareness is something a number of the insurance industry’s major carriers and brokers have spent a lot of energy promoting, and with good cause, too. According to one broker I spoke with this afternoon, companies are finally seeing the immediate results of going green, in terms of lower operating costs and much-improved records on health and safety.

One area where this all really comes together is that of reconstruction. On any given year, insurers and their clients must work together to rebuild plenty of buildings that have suffered serious damage of some kind. With a strong environmental focus, the insurance partner can play a key role in making sure the rebuilding is also a re-greening, removing old asbestos, ensuring the new construction is more energy efficient, and so on.

This is a win-win for the insured and the insurer. The insured gets a much more cost-effective building, and the insurer wins because even if the rebuilding costs are a little higher than they would otherwise be, the re-greened building can provide a lower-risk environment on a number of environmental, safety and health fronts.

There are other areas, too, where the industry has staked its environmental claim, such as raising awareness on climate change and the subsequent risk that poses to coastal development. However, the industry still has a long way to go when it comes to presenting all of its ideas on using environmentalism as a competitive benefit with a single voice.

The truth is, many insurers are still figuring out how much of the science they buy into, how much they want to sell to their clients, and how many of those clients really are in the market for it. It’s one thing to see a million people buy tickets to watch An Inconvenient Truth. It’s another to get a million insurance professionals to all agree with it.

Still, it’s not all bad.

As scattered as the industry’s views on environmentalism may be, the breadth of buy-in is really encouraging to anybody who wants to see the business world embrace environmentalism more meaningfully.

And as environmental awareness becomes more mainstream everyday, perhaps the baseline awareness of lowering energy consumption, reducing waste and pollution, and shrinking carbon footprints may make a grand, united voice from insurers unnecessary after all. Perhaps, how each insurer views green business will be nothing more than one more characteristic to sell as one their own competitive strengths.

I think we could live with that.

Many corporations now have their own blogs as a platform to market themselves and spread their knowledge of their respective business practices.

For this reason, RIMS hosted a session on the numerous risks of blogging. Speaking were Christopher Sloan of Liberty Mutual, Mark Flannery of Caterpillar and Andy Steggles of RIMS.

Andy pointed to the fact that blogs, though most times useful to companies, pose a great risk because of user-generated content (UGC), privacy protection issues and data breach worries. Other issues to worry about when operating a company blog are:

• Defamation
• Unfavorable remarks
• Infringing material
• Potential disclosure of confidential information

Chris pointed to the fact that every company using a blog should, at a minimum, monitor UGC (such as comments on the blog) and use tools like IceRocket and Google Alerts to keep up with what people are saying about your company on the internet. In fact, one of these devices helped alert a company to a bomb threat, the information for which was posted on the internet by the person in question. A man in the audience at this session shared with us the story of how Google Alerts helped notify his company of the impeding bomb threat.

“Because of Google Alerts, we were able to apprehend this person within 24 hours of this serious threat being posted on the internet.

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Chris Sloan then pointed to the following legal considerations each company should consider if they choose to operate a blog associated with their business.

• Privacy and confidentiality
• Copyright and trademark infringement
• Data security and data breach laws
• Record retention and electronically stored information
• Submission guidelines and moderation

“Whatever you do online, remember to protect your brand,” said Chris Sloan.

And protecting your brand can prove priceless, as Mark Flannery stated:

“Defaming comments on blogs can affect stock price and sales,” he said. “Financial risk is far more damaging and more far reaching than effects of defamation suits or data breaches.

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The hurricane preparedness session at RIMS 2009 featured Dave Cocchiarella, Orlando’s own Central Florida News 13 meteorologist.

Also speaking were Graeme Harper of Risk Strategies USA and Mark Yarmolich, vice president of risk management for Hercules Offshore, a provider of offshore drilling.

Dave Cocchiarella provided this forecast for the upcoming hurricane season as of April 7:

12 named storms
6 hurricanes
2 major hurricanes
54% probability of major landfall along U.S. coastline
32% east coast storms
31% gulf coast storms

Hercules Offshore pointed to the various business impacts such storms could have, such as:

Offshore — platforms, rigs vessels
Property — coastline, inland
Business income — direct, contingent, other
Production — coastal, inland, other losses

It was noted that as water temperature continues to increase, the next 10 to 20 years will see more hurricane activity, which brings the attention of risk managers to the topic of preparedness. Key questions every risk manager should consider are:

• Are you a 501(c)(3)?
• Are you aware of new federal insurance requirement regulations that could also impact your FEMA recovery?
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• If a major business interruption occurs, are you going to pay your employees? For how long?
• Have you given additional thought to how you might prepare/respond to a loss during these times of economic downturn?
• Has the downturn impacted your suppliers?
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  Your supply chain?

“When dealing with hurricane preparedness, business continuity management is absolutely crucial,” said Graeme Harper. “Make sure you get the right leadership and have backup for that leadership.”

The cost of health care in the United States is spiraling to levels that our grandparents would have thought impossible. And yet, we find ourselves, as a nation, spending more on health care each year than many other countries spend on defense.

Where this is becoming a matter for risk managers — aside from the obvious need for workers comp cost containment and loss prevention — is that the level of resources dedicated to employee health demands some level of strategic risk oversight.

For those who cut their teeth on return-to-work policies and part-time disability programs, this is an interesting development, as I learned speaking with vendors and practitioners in the field today. The rising cost of keeping a workforce healthy is providing risk managers with a growing challenge to drive the convergence of risk management, human resources and workers compensation. For some, one suspects this will be quite a challenge, but for others, it might be better seen as an opportunity to expand their professional scope.

A quick walk through the RIMS Exhibit Hall shows more than a few firms that are deep in the trenches when it comes to helping risk managers carve out their workers comp costs and manage them more efficiently. Stop to share a few words with these folks and you’ll find doing that is a task far more easily said than done, but one worth the effort anyway. Keep your eyes peeled for future posts on this topic here at the Monitor and also on the pages of Risk Management magazine.