“Going green” is now a bona fide national movement, but insurers – a group heavily tied to all things weather-related – still shows signs of deep ambivalence how companies should deal with global warming concerns, or even whether it’s something that companies should deal with at all.

Climate change-mitigating activity has exploded among insurers, according to Boston-based Ceres, an investor coalition, which reported that the 244 insurance companies it surveyed increased their climate-related activities by 50 percent in 2008.

The sprawling report touches a variety of topics, such as hurricane research efforts from insurers like XL Insurance, which has Hartford offices, or new products from Boston’s Liberty Mutual, which launched a special directors & officers’ liability product for energy or climate-related lawsuits.

But industry spokesmen like Robert Detlefsen of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies point out that the Ceres report doesn’t make a clear case for how such “greening” activities directly help insurers do better, more profitable business.

High Gloss

Reports such as Ceres’ mix business-mindedness with politically tinged advocacy, Detlefsen said – for example, Ceres encourages insurers to try to influence their policyholders to live greener lives, but doesn’t always show how this makes them a better risk for the companies that provide insurance for them.

“This report kind of glosses over how the economics of this is supposed to work for insurers,” he said.

Some insurers argue that in many cases, energy-efficiency promotion does indeed help insurers’ bottom lines. California-based Fireman’s Fund Insurance has had great success with special products that add extra coverage to make buildings more energy efficient, said spokeswoman Janet Ruiz.

As part of its original “green” product, the company gives a 5 percent discount to LEED-certified commercial building owners, and will cover the costs of upgrading to more energy-efficient systems should a home or commercial building become damaged.

The discount makes business sense because LEED-certified commercial property and energy efficient homes have been found to be lower risk, she said. They use solar energy panels that aren’t as likely to cause a fire; tankless water systems that aren’t as likely to do water damage; also, LEED-certified buildings are inspected more closely by engineers who are more likely to find potential trouble spots that could cause damage to the building.

Remember The Sale

Claire Wilkinson, vice president for global issues with the Insurance Information Institute, added that it’s also just good salesmanship. With customers concerned about mitigating their impacts on the environment, they’re demanding products like these – and insurers are wise to fill that product gap.

Ruiz said the green policies are costlier, but only slightly: the owner of a million-dollar home can get coverage for energy-efficient upgrades for about $80 extra a year. And the company said the policies have been good sellers: about 40 percent of new property insurance business incorporates an energy-efficient product.

A number of New England-based insurers have followed suit: Boston-based Lexington Insurance has a similar homeowners program it launched in 2007, and Travelers Insurance, which has a major Hartford presence, has successfully launched green-related coverage for commercial buildings that use vegetative roofs to cut back on energy use.

Andrew Logan, director of Ceres’ insurance program, said he was surprised at criticisms at the report’s bottom-line arguments. The report touches on the links between energy-efficient buildings and better risk, but also argues that insurers should be a strong lobbying voice on the subject because – although the problem is of daunting enormity – it truly is in insurers’ long-term best interest to try to slow and stop climate change.

Most troubling for insurers, warming patterns will make catastrophic weather harder to predict, Logan said. Current actuarial models will become obsolete, and that undermines the fundamentals of risk assessment.

Over the centuries, insurers have been instrumental in lobbing for the creation of fire departments, product safety research, and vehicle safety measures, he said. Taking action on climate change can be seen as the latest step in that tradition, even if this chapter deals with a larger and more complicated problem.

Still, feedback on insurers’ actions on climate change is decidedly mixed. An annual survey of 400 insurers and industry observers late last month by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers saw the topic of “climate change” plummet from No. 4 to No. 28 on the 2008 list of insurers’ top concerns, thanks largely to more pressing financial concerns like investment performance.

In its section on climate change issues, the survey predicted the topic would make a comeback among insurers’ top concerns, but said plenty in the industry “still doubt … as to whether climate change is a genuine issue, or merely one ‘got up’ by the green lobby.”