The Oct. 28 march was the first in a week of demonstrations across the United Kingdom held by Extinction Rebellion UK, the direct action activist organization, pressuring insurance companies to stop underwriting new oil, gas and coal projects. The demonstrations used costumes, songs, performances and demonstrations to paint a picture of the crises likely to ensue as global heating intensifies: disastrous global floods followed by widespread food shortages and ensuing civil unrest exacerbated by population growth and insufficient resources.

“The global week of action [brought] a lot of attention on insurers and their role in the climate crisis,” Ariel Le Bourdonnec, an analyst for Reclaim Finance, a research organization focused on analyzing financial actors’ climate impacts, said of the spring protests. “You see groups actually launching new campaigns on insurers.”

In March, Probitas, a London-based insurer that’s part of the Lloyd’s of London syndicate, confirmed that it did not intend to insure the West Cumbria coal mine in the U.K. or the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, though it attributed those decisions to the company’s environmental, social and governance policy and said it was not influenced by the week of protests. A month later, the Zurich Insurance Group announced that it would not underwrite new oil and gas extraction and metallurgical coal projects.

Activists cite these decisions as evidence that protest tactics are effecting change.