The world’s biggest insurer just announced it’s going to stop investing in tobacco!

Axa says investing in the tobacco industry makes no sense for a company that insures people’s health. So it’s going to ditch its €1.7bn tobacco investments, and stop investing in tobacco.

It’s a huge blow for Big Tobacco. But Axa is the only commercial insurer in Europe to take a stand so far. Imagine if we could get Europe’s other top health insurers follow suit? We could make the movement towards divestment from tobacco unstoppable!

Tell Zurich, Aviva and Allianz to follow Axa’s lead and stop investing in tobacco.

Smoking kills six million people every year -- and the World Health Organisation estimates that figure will rise to eight million, mostly in developing countries, by 2030. It should be the industry dying, not millions of people. But of all of Europe’s major institutional investors, Axa is the only one to have stubbed out tobacco.

So far.

We can change that, by showing Europe’s other major health insurers that tobacco doesn’t just pose a risk to people’s health -- it also poses a risk to investors, especially health insurers. Axa, which divested from coal last year, calls tobacco ‘a sunset industry’. "The business case [for divesting] is positive," says its chief executive, Thomas Buberl. "The human cost of tobacco is tragic - its economic cost is huge."

We know that divestment campaigns can work -- often against all the odds. Divestment helped to end apartheid in South Africa. Right now, it’s helping in the battle against climate change, as institutions around the world cut their ties with fossil fuel companies, taking away both funds and ‘social licence’ for those corporations. If we can get Europe’s major insurance companies to follow Axa's lead and divest from tobacco, it will be the beginning of the end for Big Tobacco.

Sign our petition telling Zurich, Aviva and Allianz to stop investing in tobacco.