IAG has emphasised its commitment to climate change action, after a shareholder resolution called for clear targets for reducing investment exposure to fossil fuels.

Environmental campaign group Market Forces, which lodged the resolution last week on behalf of more than 100 shareholders, says IAG is the only major insurance company in the country with no timetable for ending thermal coal investments.

Market Forces says IAG’s increased provisioning for natural perils shows the impact of global warming on the group.

“For financial year 2020, IAG has set the natural peril allowance at $641 million, an increase of around 100% over the past decade,” campaigner Pablo Brait said. “However, even these allowance increases have been insufficient.

“IAG’s shareholders and customers are feeling the financial impacts of the climate crisis, while at the same time their company is investing in the dirty industries fuelling it.”

Market Forces says investors are not able to determine IAG’s coal, oil and gas investment exposure, or its expected trajectory, because terms used in its Climate Action Plan are “undefined and ambiguous”.

But an IAG spokesman told insuranceNEWS.com.au it has “a proud and longstanding record of action on climate change” and that rapid progress is being made.

The spokesman says the group’s investment portfolio has “very limited exposure to higher risk companies”, as defined under Morgan Stanley Capital International’s Low Carbon Reduction criteria.

“These represented just 0.13% of our investment portfolio at 30 June 2019, and a clear trend has been established with this representing a 70% reduction on the proportion only two years earlier.”