- Title: ARGENTINA: Argentina pioneers environmental insurance
- Date: 20th October 2008
- Summary: BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA (NOVEMBER 13, 2009) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) LAWYER REPRESENTING THE ARGENTINA'S HOMOSEXUAL COMMUNITY (CHA) PEDRO PARADISO, SAYING: "When the Pope has the question if civil unions and [gay] marriage on the agenda, it is as if the world has ended. Of course, it can't be easy for any president to arrive at the Vatican to meet with the Pope wit
- Embargoed: 4th November 2008 14:32
- Keywords:
- Location: Argentina
- Country: Argentina
- Topics: Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
- Reuters ID: LVA2UAQQVLXB62XK3TV5Z2RI9BWL
- Aspect Ratio: 4:3
- Story Text: Argentina becomes first country to implement mandatory environmental insurance.
Argentine officials said on Thursday (October 17) theirs is the first government worldwide to require that companies engaged in potentially hazardous activities buy insurance to cover environmental damage.
Preliminary figures show that some 35,000 companies would have to comply with the new rules and buy up policies ranging from 120,000 pesos ($36,090) a year to 50 million pesos ($15 million), depending on a given company's activities, output and the potential risk involved.
Companies running massive mines in the Andes or drilling for oil in the Patagonia are the riskiest and will be on the upper end of the price spread.
In Europe, environmental insurance is not obligatory but is widely used and a number of countries are evaluating forcing the measure by 2010.
Sergio Chodos, an undersecretary at the Environment Secretariat, said Argentina was taking an important step in putting the issue to the forefront and hoped one day it would be as common as car insurance.
"In objective terms, I think it puts Argentina on an important level for creating consciousness about the problem. The lawmakers envisioned it as obligatory to work with it and put it on the social agenda," Chodos said.
It's been a long road for the law that sat dormant in Congress for nearly six years. Argentina's Congress passed it in 2002, but it was trumped by economic and social chaos before finally being implemented last month.
The implementation owes much to a long struggle against a papermill built in Uruguay on a river bordering Argentina, a fight that galvanized the country's environmental movement.
Argentina failed to block the plant built by Finnish firm Botnia, but protests and a trial at The Hague increased environmental consciousness within the country and trained a more critical eye on local industry, where pollution has run rampant because of a lack of environmental policy or failures to enforce policies.
Officials hope insurance policies will clean up places like the Riachuelo River, a waterway choked by industrial waste that forms the southern border of the capital Buenos Aires.
Jorge Furlan, president of a chamber set up to sell the policies, explained only one insurance company wass currently authorized to sell this type of coverage in Argentina, but others were applying to do so.
And he said most large companies, including Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras which has plant in Buenos Aires, have already asked about insurance.
"Generally, all the big companies that work through large insurance companies and brokers have asked us about the possibility of getting this policy," Furlan said.
The requirement is not exclusive to oil and mining companies, but will affect all industries with the potential to cause environmental damage. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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