At LGT, our sustainable investment approach is centred on two interconnected themes: cleaner economies and healthier societies.
Access to healthcare and financial protection helps support healthier, more financially secure populations, strengthening community and economic resilience over time.
Global trends are reshaping health and financial resilience, creating a diverse set of investment risks and opportunities across sectors and markets.
Robust economic, financial and social systems ultimately depend on healthy people – in workplaces, supply chains, communities and institutions. When people are healthier and better protected against financial shocks, communities are more resilient, businesses are more productive and economies are better placed to grow sustainably over time. Investing to support healthier societies is therefore not only important from a human perspective; it is closely linked to economic stability and, in turn, financial returns.
Today, powerful global trends, such as demographic change, climate volatility and tropical disease migration, are reshaping the risk of disease, access to healthcare and financial protection. In turn, they are creating a diverse set of risks and opportunities across sectors and markets – from hospitals, insurers and digital health providers to companies improving workplace wellbeing, community infrastructure and everyday living conditions. In this article, we outline our approach to healthier societies as an investment theme and why it is relevant for long-term economic and portfolio resilience.
At LGT, our sustainable investment framework is centred around two primary and interconnected mega-trends: cleaner economies and healthier societies. To define the latter as an investment theme, we look to established and widely recognised definitions and frameworks, mostly developed by NGOs, development institutions or government bodies.
Take for example The World Health Organisation’s foundational definition of health, which is given as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". In a similar vein, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight that health is not only shaped by access to and the improved provision of healthcare, but also by broader social and environmental factors, including poverty, hunger, education, clean water and sanitation and climate action.
These frameworks provide a grounded and credible basis for understanding health in its holistic sense and help inform our investment approach, enabling us to look beyond just healthcare provision to identify opportunities across sectors that contribute to healthier societies over the long term.
In short, investing for heathier societies extends beyond directly health-related sectors such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals to include the broader systems and conditions that shape wellbeing, resilience and long-term economic stability.
Access to essential services, such as personal or health insurance and publicly funded healthcare, safeguards communities, helps them navigate uncertainty and participate more fully in the economy. For investors, this has direct implications for portfolio resilience, as long-term returns are shaped by the strength of the societies and economies in which investee companies operate.
Demographics, health systems, social safety nets and levels of financial protection differ across regions, creating distinct risks and opportunities for investors. Many of the systems that support health and wellbeing are facing growing pressure, with ageing populations, rising healthcare costs and unequal access to services creating challenges across both developed and emerging economies. At the same time, these pressures are driving demand for new products and services designed to improve health outcomes and financial security.
The insurance industry sits at the intersection of these trends, connecting healthcare, illness and financial protection, making it a key sector of interest when investing for healthier societies.
By pooling risk across many policyholders, insurance can protect individuals and families from costs they could not easily absorb on their own. This is especially important in developing nations, where safety nets are often limited. The World Bank reports that two billion people in low- and middle-income countries remain uncovered or inadequately covered by social protection, and three in four people in the poorest countries have no social protection at all.1 In this context, an unexpected illness, accident or loss of income can quickly become a serious financial strain. The impact is not just individual, but structural, with widespread vulnerability to shocks undermining community resilience, with implications for the broader economy. Expanding access to insurance products in these markets can therefore help improve financial resilience for vulnerable populations, while also offering long-term investment opportunities.
Our investment in AIA Group illustrates our approach to investing in healthier societies in practice. As the largest pan-Asian life and health insurer, it serves more than 44 million individual policyholders and 16 million members of group insurance schemes across the region.2
Despite the firm’s scale, overall insurance penetration in Asia remains relatively low, making the investment opportunity substantial. Swiss Re estimates that Asia's health protection gap exceeded $250 billion in 2024, with out-of-pocket healthcare costs a major source of financial stress across the region.3
Download the report to explore the trends shaping investment risks and opportunities, and how they influence our approach to investing, stewardship and business operations.
Sustainable development spans the full breadth of global markets. Despite common assumptions, sustainable investment opportunities are not confined to niche or specialist areas. Many of the businesses helping to address social and environmental challenges operate across a wide range of industries, and the insurance sector is a good example of this in practice.
Investing in companies like AIA shows how the healthier societies theme can extend beyond narrow sector labels and highlights the value of a thematic investment approach grounded in fundamental research and robust sustainability criteria. Such an approach can broaden exposure across sectors and help investors to participate in long-term structural growth opportunities, while investing in the conditions that underpin stronger, more resilient portfolios for sustainable value creation over time.
Discover more about our holistic approach to sustainability in the 2026 360 Report. Download the report here.
[1] State of Social Protection Report 2025: The 2-Billion-Person Challenge
[2] About Us | Asia's Leading Insurance Company | AIA Group Limited
[3] Sustainability-Report_EN.pdf ; Asia Life & Health consumer survey 2025 | Swiss Re
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