At the Bank of England, the risks posed by climate change are currently most directly relevant to our micro prudential responsibilities for the safety and soundness of the banking and insurance sectors. Assessing how well general insurers and reinsurers are identifying, measuring and mitigating weather-related risks, has long been part of supervising insurers. We published a stocktake of insurers’ progress in adapting to climate change in late 2015, and are working to update and deepen our assessment with a second stocktake in 2018. More recently, we have extended our focus to the financial risks faced by the UK banking system, and will publish the full results of the survey I referred to a moment ago in coming months. The aim for both pieces of work is to consider whether insurers and banks have adequate governance arrangements to develop strategies for identifying and mitigating climate risk across their entire businesses, both their liabilities and assets, and over sufficiently long time horizons. We aim to highlight examples of good practice and to articulate our supervisory expectations later this year. We are also considering our approach to assessing risks across the system as a whole. The Bank has routinely included weather-related shocks in the scenarios for its biennial general insurance stress test, including three North American hurricanes in 2017. This meant we had a good sense of the likely resilience of the market and individual firms when Harvey, Irma and Maria 8  hit – both in terms of exposures and mitigating actions.
First, in time for the Argentine G20 Summit, drawing on the work of the Big Four accounting firms, the Task Force will report on implementation experience, focusing on examples of good practice to foster wider adoption. Second, the Task Force is launching a Resource Hub to provide technical support, data, and collaborative partnerships – all aimed at helping companies implement the recommendations in as effective and efficient a manner as possible. As preparers, financials and investors 'learn by doing’, a virtuous cycle will be created where more and better information creates the imperatives for others to adopt the TCFD and for everyone to up their game on the quality of information they provide. This iterative process is a reason why there is likely cause for the Task Force to continue beyond the Argentine Summit in late 2018 and into the Japanese presidency. In particular, it will be important to get feedback from investors on which disclosures are truly decision useful so that this process is as efficient and effective as possible. Third, insurers and banks. Insurers have long been on the front line of the physical risks posed by climate change such as extreme weather events. Since the 1980s, the number of registered weather-related loss events has tripled. Inflationadjusted insurance losses have increased from an annual average of around $ in the  5  See ISS, (2018), United States Proxy Voting Guidelines, Benchmark Policy Recommendations, and Glass Lewis, (2018), Guidelines: An Overview of the Glass Lewis Approach to Proxy Advice.