Geneva — Maryam Golnaraghi, Director of Climate Change and Environment at The Geneva Association, has been named Climate and Sustainability Champion of the Year 2026 in InsuranceERM’s Climate Risk and Sustainability Awards.
The judges recognised her more than 25 years of leadership in climate risk and resilience, particularly her work to help the insurance industry support the energy transition and strengthen resilience to growing physical climate risks. The Geneva Association announced the honour in October 2026, and InsuranceERM published an interview with Golnaraghi to mark the award.
A career built on turning climate risk into practical solutions
Golnaraghi is a director at The Geneva Association, a think tank for the reinsurance and insurance industry, where she specialises in climate change, environmental risks, resilience and decarbonisation. InsuranceERM also highlighted her ability to bring stakeholders together to turn research into practical solutions, including initiatives aimed at accelerating industrial decarbonisation and safeguarding home insurance availability and affordability.
Asked what the award means to her, Golnaraghi said it recognises an approach she has championed throughout her career: making climate and sustainability core business priorities, and building strategic partnerships to think beyond conventional approaches and develop solutions.
“This award means a great deal as I see it as recognition of an approach I have championed throughout my career: making climate and sustainability core business priorities, and building strategic partnerships to think beyond conventional approaches and develop solutions,” she said.
Bringing insurers to the table early
Golnaraghi said her proudest work over the past year has been demonstrating the value of bringing reinsurers’ and insurers’ risk management expertise to the table early, alongside governments, hard-to-abate industries and other partners. She said The Geneva Association’s collaborative research has taken a strategic and holistic approach to identifying and managing emerging risks to improve insurability and investability.
She pointed to partnerships that grew from the association’s research on bringing climate technology to market and expediting industrial decarbonisation. That work led to a further research collaboration with the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative and the Clean Energy Ministerial, addressing the insurability challenges of carbon management projects as they scale.
According to Golnaraghi, the effort produced guiding tenets for early reinsurer and insurer engagement, whole-value-chain risk assessment and allocation, and regulatory alignment, aimed at making carbon capture and storage projects more insurable, bankable, investable and scalable.
From reacting to risks to building resilience
Reflecting on a career of nearly 30 years, Golnaraghi said insurers were early adopters of climate science, hiring scientists and investing in research on extreme-weather risks and catastrophe models. The focus later expanded to corporate responsibility, environmental, social and governance issues, climate-related financial risk and disclosure, and more recently to accelerating resilience and decarbonisation solutions.
Looking ahead, she said the greatest progress the industry can make is to use its expertise in climate risk assessment and adaptation to help society move from reacting to physical climate risks to proactively reducing them and building resilience. That means reducing the vulnerability of homes, businesses, industrial facilities and critical infrastructure, and strengthening the communities and natural systems around them.
Her association’s Safeguarding Home Insurance report highlights how decisions by many different stakeholders could drive up the exposure and vulnerability of homes and communities to extreme weather. Reducing those risks, she said, requires integrating resilience into land-use planning, construction, operations and maintenance, retrofitting, valuation, financing and insurance, supported by incentives.
FAKTA
- Who: Maryam Golnaraghi, Director of Climate Change and Environment at The Geneva Association.
- What: Climate and Sustainability Champion of the Year 2026, InsuranceERM Climate Risk and Sustainability Awards.
- Why: More than 25 years of leadership in climate risk and resilience, helping insurers support the energy transition and strengthen resilience to physical climate risks.
- Key work: Early insurer engagement on industrial decarbonisation, climate technology and the insurability of carbon management projects, plus research on safeguarding home insurance.
- Her message: Insurers should help society move from reacting to climate risks to proactively reducing them and building resilience.
