Environmental awareness is something a number of the insurance industry’s major carriers and brokers have spent a lot of energy promoting, and with good cause, too. According to one broker I spoke with this afternoon, companies are finally seeing the immediate results of going green, in terms of lower operating costs and much-improved records on health and safety.

One area where this all really comes together is that of reconstruction. On any given year, insurers and their clients must work together to rebuild plenty of buildings that have suffered serious damage of some kind. With a strong environmental focus, the insurance partner can play a key role in making sure the rebuilding is also a re-greening, removing old asbestos, ensuring the new construction is more energy efficient, and so on.

This is a win-win for the insured and the insurer. The insured gets a much more cost-effective building, and the insurer wins because even if the rebuilding costs are a little higher than they would otherwise be, the re-greened building can provide a lower-risk environment on a number of environmental, safety and health fronts.

There are other areas, too, where the industry has staked its environmental claim, such as raising awareness on climate change and the subsequent risk that poses to coastal development. However, the industry still has a long way to go when it comes to presenting all of its ideas on using environmentalism as a competitive benefit with a single voice.

The truth is, many insurers are still figuring out how much of the science they buy into, how much they want to sell to their clients, and how many of those clients really are in the market for it. It’s one thing to see a million people buy tickets to watch An Inconvenient Truth. It’s another to get a million insurance professionals to all agree with it.

Still, it’s not all bad.

As scattered as the industry’s views on environmentalism may be, the breadth of buy-in is really encouraging to anybody who wants to see the business world embrace environmentalism more meaningfully.

And as environmental awareness becomes more mainstream everyday, perhaps the baseline awareness of lowering energy consumption, reducing waste and pollution, and shrinking carbon footprints may make a grand, united voice from insurers unnecessary after all. Perhaps, how each insurer views green business will be nothing more than one more characteristic to sell as one their own competitive strengths.

I think we could live with that.