This week, supporters of Extinction Rebellion’s Insure our Survival campaign are targeting the offices of insurance companies up and down the country in a national wave of action, demanding that they refuse to insure destructive new fossil fuel projects and end their complicity in climate disaster and human rights abuses.
On Wednesday July 10th 2025, more than a dozen protesters from a coalition of climate action groups in Manchester gathered outside Marsh offices in Belvedere on Booth Street.
Marsh acts as broker insurance for a number of large fossil fuel projects including the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). The protesters read out testimonies from people in Uganda whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the pipeline and spoke to employees as they entered the building, encouraging them to put pressure on their company to “drop EACOP”.
EACOP has already displaced thousands of families in Uganda and Tanzania and is threatening food and water security and violating human rights, while disturbing critical ecosystems including Lake Victoria and Murchison Falls National Park
The scientific consensus is that the use of fossil fuels must end as soon as possible to curb climate disaster . The EACOP is one of many “carbon bombs” ; fossil fuel projects which would unleash massive quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, fueling extreme weather worldwide and increasing the deadly flooding, heatwaves, and droughts that are already becoming regular occurrences in the UK .
In addition to the EACOP, Marsh has brokered, or continues to broker, insurance for the expansion of the Banshkhali coal power hub in Bangladesh; the Adani Carmichael Coalmine and railway project in Queensland, Australia; the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Alberta, Canada and LNG (methane) export terminals in the US Gulf Coast.
At the same time, insurance companies are using climate change as an excuse to double or even triple the cost of home insurance for ordinary homeowners, allowing them to rake in more profit from a crisis of their own making .
Many leading insurers are taking the bold step of pulling out of insuring new fossil fuel projects. On the same street as Marsh is the insurance company Chubb which, after being the target of similar protests said earlier this year it would not cover EACOP .
This national week of action will be followed by a wave of international action in September, in solidarity with activists on the front line of the new oil and gas projects.
Martin Porter of Manchester Greenpeace said: “We are already seeing the catastrophic effects of climate chaos on our TV screens, Instead of displacing poor people to pipe oil across Africa so that Big Oil can make even more money, we should be leaving it in the ground. Our message is simple: oil companies need to stop drilling and start paying.”
Cordelia Newsome member of Greater Manchester Climate Justice Coalition said: “Marsh should listen to its employees. In 2023 more than 100 of them signed a letter urging their company not to broker insurance for the EACOP because of its “disastrous consequences” for the climate. If the insurance industry is to have a future at all it needs to stop fueling climate change and human rights abuses, and play its part in building a safer and more sustainable future for us all.”
