Insurers should work harder to persuade governments to engage with their long-term fiscal responsibilities, which include climate change, according to Stephen Catlin.
Catlin, who is executive deputy chairman of insurance and reinsurance company XL Group, said governments are often reticent to engage with issues with primary impacts that are likely to stretch beyond their term in office.
He was speaking at Environmental Finance's Insurance and Climate Risk conference in London.
"One of the serious challenges we have, globally, is with politicians, whose average duration of tenure is between five-10 years at most," said Catlin.
"Their interest is when they're in power - when you talk about a one-in-five-year event they listen, when you talk to them about a one-in-ten-year event they'll listen because they're hoping they're still there... Once you get to a one-in-25-year event, their eyes get a little bit sleepy, and when you get to a one-in-100-year event they're snoring," Catlin said.
He said insurers and reinsurers have to persuade politicians to accept part of their role is fiscal responsibility over a long timeframe. This needs to be done in a supportive way he said.
"We need to explain to them how we can help them think it through. There's plenty of evidence that shows the higher the insured loss, the quicker the economic recovery, the decrease in deprivation and the lower cost to the taxpayer, but we haven't yet communicated that adequately - it goes back to because we haven't described what we do."
He said the insurance industry is not trusted in the way that it should be, and that governments are as a result mistrustful when individual insurance companies try to win contracts.
"Swiss Re has been one of the leading lights in trying to build trust, but one of the things Christian Mumenthaler told me was that he still finds it hard to go into governments to get them to listen: the government assumes we're going to pick their pockets
"The message I've been trying to get through is that yes, we are there to give a return for our shareholders commensurate to the risk we take, but we can do that and at the same time create societal value.
"We can do some things more efficiently than the country can do itself, but to do that we have to get the trust and understanding of the people we talk to," Catlin said.
Catlin added that one of the key aims of the Insurance Development Forum, which he chairs, is to try and build that trust and work together as an industry.
