Sustainable Development Goals

Running our business responsibly every day and contributing to the United Nations SDGs

This includes respecting human rights, managing supply chains responsibly and practicing good governance. 

We protect what’s important to our customers

We help our customers to protect what matters and save for the future. We have a wide range of products to support our customers with everyday challenges that affect them and their communities.

Many of our constituent companies were pioneers of insurance cover. We were the first to offer accident insurance to protect people from the dangers of travelling on early (and often perilous) railways, and at the forefront of early car insurance.

Today we see ourselves as a 320-year-old disruptor. We’re looking at what role insurance can play in a world with driverless cars for instance. But more broadly, we want to harness the opportunities arising from digital to help our customers.

We believe innovation in technology can help improve people’s lives. We are using telematics to reward young drivers when they drive safely by reducing their premium. We’ve also been developing digital tools and interfaces so that our customers can understand how to save better.

We are partnering with incubators to support and invest in startups. Like Owlstone Medical who are developing a breathalyzer that can detect diseases at a very early stage.  

Our contribution to society

We’ve been engaging actively with policy makers in the UK, EU and internationally. We want to make sure the proper foundations are in place to support the creation of sustainable capital markets, thereby bringing our support across all Sustainable Development Goals’ funding. 

Beside this policy engagement, we contribute to society in many ways, including:

  • creating new insurance products that help our customers
  • active ownership and engagement of Aviva Investors’ Responsible Investment Officers
  • the Aviva Community Fund, which offers funding to community projects.

How we’re supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On 25 September 2015, more than 150 world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. As a founding partner of Project Everyone, an initiative backed by the UN and the Gates Foundation, we played a key role in helping increase awareness of Sustainable Development Goals across the world. It reached an estimated three billion people through the launch alone.

We know that for the goals to be successfully reached by 2030, everyone needs to play their part. Governments, the private sector, civil society and each and every one of us. We believe businesses like ours have a key role in helping achieve this vision. 

Since issuing our first insurance policy over 300 years ago, we’ve never been afraid to tackle the big issues. With current challenges such as ageing populations and climate change, our ambition needs to be bigger than at any time in our history. 

We believe the Sustainable Development Goals can guide us, our customers, and society towards a better tomorrow.

What we’re doing

As well as contributing to the SDGs through the activation of our Better Tomorrow Plan, we are also working with the World Benchmarking Alliance, along with the Index Initiative and the United Nations Foundation, to establish public, transparent and authoritative league tables, ranking companies on their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Alliance was launched in 2018 and the first set of benchmarks will be published in 2020 and will address food and agriculture, climate and energy, digital inclusion and gender equality and empowerment.

The alliance is also supported by the governments of the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark and was named as one of the 10 winning initiatives at the November 2018 Paris Peace Forum. 

In support of these efforts to enhance companies’ disclosure against the SDGs, at Davos in January 2020 we also launched a report we commissioned with Corporate Knights on Measuring sustainability disclosure report. The report ranks the world’s stock exchanges based on their sustainability disclosures. Seven sustainability indicators are considered: employee turnover, energy, greenhouse gas emissions, injury rate, personnel costs, waste and water.