Is your dog keeping Swiss Re's underwriters up at night?

A recent study published by the US National Academy of Sciences has revealed a widespread public misunderstanding of which everyday actions most affect the climate. The findings have implications not just for policymakers, but also for insurers grappling with risk assessments in an age when consumer behaviour and climate outcomes are increasingly entwined. Swiss Re has already predicted carriers will face climate-related claims of US$145 billion this year - and without meaningful changes, those costs will continue to rise annually.

The research asked participants to rank a range of lifestyle choices - from flying to recycling - by their climate impact. The results were sobering: most people failed to identify the most carbon-intensive actions, while overestimating the significance of lower-impact habits.

“People over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviours much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat,” said Madalina Vlasceanu, co-author of the report and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University.

The analysis found that avoiding air travel, opting out of pet ownership, and sourcing renewable electricity are among the most effective individual measures. Yet these were also the least recognised by participants.

By contrast, changing lightbulbs, recycling, or adjusting washing habits were consistently overrated in terms of their climate benefit. “You can see the bottle being recycled. That’s visible. Whereas carbon emissions, that’s invisible to the human eye. So that’s why we don’t associate emissions with flying,” Jiaying Zhao, a psychologist and sustainability expert at the University of British Columbia told the Associated Press.

Perhaps most surprising for respondents was the impact of household pets. Dogs, in particular, were singled out because of their reliance on meat-heavy diets. “People just don’t associate pets with carbon emissions. That link is not clear in people’s minds,” Zhao explained.

Dogs contribute to climate change primarily through the production of their meat-based food, which creates emissions equivalent to about 64 million tons of CO2 annually in the US alone, a figure comparable to the emissions of 13.6 million cars. 

"Underlying risk is increasing continuously with economic and population growth as well as urban sprawl, including in areas vulnerable to natural catastrophes. In addition, climate change effects are playing a role in compounding losses for some weather perils and regions," Swiss Re said in a recent report.

And that risk, is being misjudged by the people who are actually contributing to the problem.

Marketing is partly to blame, according to Vlasceanu, with more emphasis placed on recycling campaigns than on air travel or animal agriculture. Cognitive biases play a role as well: frequent actions such as recycling are mentally “heavier” than rare ones like flying.

The presence of misleading corporate messaging only compounds the confusion. “There has been a lot of deliberate confusion out there to support policies that are really out of date,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Lessons for insurance

For insurers, the study highlights a paradox: while climate change is driven by large-scale forces, individual choices collectively matter - and public misperception shapes both political will and consumer behaviour.

Air travel is a case in point. A single return flight from New York to Los Angeles produces more than 1,300 pounds of emissions per passenger, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. That is comparable to a year without meat consumption or three months without a car. Yet many still regard it as a minor indulgence rather than a carbon-heavy act.

Such blind spots can distort how households perceive climate risk, influencing demand for products such as travel cover, pet insurance, or renewable energy incentives.

The researchers found that interventions do help. Once participants were shown the true rankings of actions, many shifted their intentions towards higher-impact changes. “People do learn from these interventions,” Vlasceanu noted. “After learning, they are more willing to commit to actually more impactful actions.”

For the insurance sector, this suggests an opportunity to integrate climate literacy into client engagement, whether through underwriting conversations, product design, or broader corporate responsibility campaigns. Insurers, after all, sit at the intersection of consumer behaviour and climate consequence.