Delighted & honoured to join Sanctuary Asia advisory board!

April, 2023

I had always wanted to write for Sanctuary Asia magazine ever since setting my sights on its first issue in 1981. So when the iconic founding editor Bittu Sahgal invited me to co-author the cover story – DYSTOPIA IN REAL TIME – for the August 2022 edition with him, it made sense to jump at the opportunity.

For much of the last four decades, I was consumed by the business of risk, and had wondered how to steer away the insurance industry from aiding and abetting the harm it causes the environment, notwithstanding all the good it does.

I have admired Bittu’s conviction that #riskmanagement, #insurance, #actuarial space et al have a vital role to play in #mitigating the #ClimateCrisis we are besieged in. Insurance, after all, like the rest of the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecosystem. Unfortunately, we are already seeing cracks in the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (#NZIA).

It is my honour and privilege to share – as of April 2023 – I have joined the advisory board of Sanctuary Asia. Delighted to be in the gracious company of this esteemed group of people. Looking forward to continue learning about environmental governance and mainstreaming of Nature into our day to day lives, in particular.

PS: Bittu Sahgal’s response on the LinkedIn post

“Praveen we who seek to protect the biosphere should be grateful to YOU!

To most it might sound counter intuitive, but in the months and years ahead, not environmentalists, but reinsurance companies, actuaries, and insurance professionals will blow the risk whistle on project proponents foisting dangerous, financially unviable and ecologically disastrous projects on nations led by politicians, bureaucrats and policy makers who do not fully comprehend the brutal power of the biosphere to stop them and billions of citizens in their tracks.

For decades now Earth’s biosphere has been sending us warnings. In more recent years the biosphere has upped the ante with consequences. If you notice, like Marvel’s all-powerful Thanos (a stand in for the biosphere), delivers no judgements.

Impotent judgements, in today’s world, are left to courts, judges and billionaires… all straws in the wind before a biosphere wronged.

It’s time we curbed the grossly ‘Irresponsible Optimism’ on display by the carbon cowboys, and replace it with ‘Hopeful Pessimism’, the cornerstone of the ‘Precautionary Principle’ that has always been the bulwark of the insurance industry”.