Social Purpose at Aviva

2019 Round-Up

Last year, our people at Aviva did some smashing stuff to reduce our impact on the environment and boost positive changes in the world. Here are some of the stats we want to celebrate:

• Spent over 35,000 volunteer hours helping out local community causes
• Filled 1,700 Christmas giftboxes for refugees
• Cared for 300,000 bees in our office apiaries
• Waved goodbye to single-use plastic across all our UK offices
• Raised over £1.1m in employee fundraising

Strengthening Communities:

Partnerships help us do more good for more people.

In 2018, our community investment totalled £17.6 million and our community programmes helped 1,554,000 people and supported  3,100 projects around the world.

We have now helped over 7,000 projects since 2015, exceeding our target of 5,000 projects by 2020.

Aviva Community Fund (ACF)

Our online ACF invites the public to nominate and vote for inspirational projects in their local communities to win funding.

British Red Cross partnership

We have renewed our global partnership with the British Red Cross for an additional 2 years allowing us to work together to help communities around the world prepare and respond to disaster.

Our people making a difference

Aviva’s people continue to make a difference in communities around the world. Over 7,000 employees contributed more than 57,500 hours of volunteering time and gave or fundraised over £2.1 million.

Not only is this great news for our communities, but it also helps us attract and develop talented people.

Our 2017 people survey shows 88% of our people believe that Aviva is a good corporate citizen (15% more than the industry benchmark, and up 8% since 2015). These employees are also 58% more likely to be proud to work for Aviva and 41% more likely to recommend our products to friends and family.

Climate risk and environmental impact:

Taking a long-term approach.

There is no greater collective risk we face today than tackling climate change. If we do not take urgent action to limit global temperature increases to within 2°C, the impacts upon the economy, society and our business will be nothing short of devastating. Aviva is determined to make its own contribution to tackling climate change. This is not at odds with business or investment. In fact, it is a business imperative.

We were the first carbon neutral international insurer in 2006. We continue to offset any remaining operational carbon emissions today. Our offsetting projects have improved the health and lives of more than 1 million people globally since 2012, through actions like provision of clean cook-stoves in Kenya.

This year we were awarded the United Nations Momentum for Change award in recognition of a decade of work reducing our environmental impact and helping inspire action on climate change.

To date we have achieved a 60% reduction in CO2e against the 2010 baseline, meeting our 2020 target (of 50%) early. We continue work towards our ambitious long-term target of a 70% reduction by 2030.

2018 stocktake

In 2018, countries from across the world gathered in Katowice, Poland to join an “initial stocktaking exercise” on progress to deliver the Paris Agreement.

We have also performed our own stocktake to assess what we have delivered on the different elements of our 2015 strategy. As the stocktake shows, we have made significant progress in addressing climate change across our business. But there also remains significant work to do.

We plan to follow this stocktake in 2019 with a new forward-looking climate change strategy. This strategy builds on the progress made so far and the climate scenario analysis we are currently undertaking as part of our reporting against the recommendations made by the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD).

Lower carbon investment

In 2018, Aviva assigned £1.8 billion of new investment in wind, solar, biomass and energy efficiency.

With now over £3 billion invested in low carbon infrastructure since 2015 we have achieved our 2020 target of investing £2.5bn investment between 2015-2020, two years early.

Aviva also hold nearly £1.3 billion in green bonds to support the transition to a low-carbon economy.