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Over the past several decades, businesses have been placed under great pressure from government and the public to avoid environmental loss and damages. To mitigate environmental loss and damages, companies purchase environmental insurance, which protects companies from direct financial liability and transfers the risk to the insurance agency. Thus, insurance companies to have a vested interest in preventing payouts to businesses by ensuring that their clients protect against environmental losses. Past literature in the field of environmental management has paid little attention to the role of insurance companies and their agents in the prevention of environmental loss and damage. However, there is anecdotal evidence that insurance agents can play an active role in helping firms identify and prevent environmental health and safety issues. Focusing on the printing industry, this study aims to better understand the role insurance agents play in helping firms manage their environmental performance. This study found that insurance companies view themselves as institutions that enhance environmental health and safety performance of manufacturing facilities by preventing environmental health and safety risks. However, it is not clear that printing firms likely do not believe insurance companies contribute to preventing environmental health and safety risks at their facilities. Thus, while there is potential for insurance companies to act as non-public governance institutions that regulate and improve the environmental performance of firms, this potential may not be being realized to its fullest extent.

Brownfields occur in older communities where former industrial or commercial operations pose environmental issues, such as liability and expensive cleanup costs, that have made reuse of the contaminated land problematic. Brownfields redevelopment plays an important role in urban revitalization and offers alternatives to greenfield developments. Due to the issues of liability, brownfields are not being redeveloped at a desirable rate. A new tool, Environmental Insurance (EI), is available for local governments that may help to promote the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields by limiting liability associated with the discovery and cleanup of contamination on brownfield properties. This thesis examined the impacts of liability on the brownfield development process and identified EI policies that apply to brownfield redevelopment and assist in reducing the risks of liability. This was accomplished through a comparative case study of two brownfield redevelopment sites, the Former Carthage Mills site in the neighborhood of Carthage in the City of Cincinnati and the Former Jefferson Smurfit site in the Village of Lockland. The decision to use EI relies heavily upon the past and future uses, the type and amount of contamination, and prior knowledge of EI. The case studies have shown there needs to be cooperation between different agencies involved for EI to be successful in redeveloping more brownfields in Cincinnati.